Ripening the stragglers indoors: whole plants, cut stems and one banana
By the second week of September the greenhouse was cooling fast, with nights at 8 degrees and the plants beginning to yellow from the bottom, and there were still something like forty green pods on the two habaneros, one cayenne and the stuffing type. The question every year is how many of those will turn. Green chillies are perfectly good to eat, but the habaneros in particular are a different thing once they are orange, and I wanted to see what worked.
I tried three approaches, roughly a third of the pods to each. The first was to bring the whole habanero plants indoors in their pots and stand them on a table by the south window in the front room, watered sparingly. The second was to cut the cayenne stems with pods attached, strip the leaves, and hang them from a hook over the kitchen cooker where it is warm and dry. The third was to pick the stuffing-type pods green and put them in a paper bag with a ripe banana, on the theory that the ethylene from the banana would push them along.
Three weeks on, this is how it went. The potted habaneros ripened 19 of 26 pods to full orange over 16 days, and the rest are showing colour at the shoulder, so I expect most of them. The plants dropped half their leaves on the first day indoors, which looked alarming and did not matter. The hanging cayenne stems ripened all eleven pods to red in nine days, faster than on the plant, and they have gone straight on to drying without being moved. The paper bag was the disappointment: three of the eight pods turned a dull red, two went soft and wrinkled at the stem end and had to be used at once, and three were still green when I gave up and sliced them for a sauce.
So the banana trick works for a few, but it ripens from the outside and the pod loses firmness before the colour arrives. The whole plant on a warm windowsill is slow but reliable. Cutting stems is the method I will use for anything long and thin. The greenhouse plants that are left, the jalapeños, are going on the compost this weekend, and the pots are being scrubbed for next year.