[gardengnome]

Well I've got two chilli plants and literally thousands of chillis hanging off them!

Trouble is they're taking ages to ripen!  And I've got a feeling they'll all ripen at the same time... there's a limit to how much chilli I can eat in one go!

Just wondering if you can pick them at any point?  I've got lots of one-inch sized green ones, and a couple of big, almost grown green ones.

Thanks!

[arugula]

You can pick them green, they will still ripen. One popular way to deal with them is to string them on a 'ristra'. 

[shokkyy]

I'm still using my chilli crop from last year. I had a huge crop of Superchilli and Cayenne and made them into ristras and they're still good. Just as well really because my crop this year is utterly pathetic. Even now the plants are still under sized. They are putting off quite a bit of fruit, but there's just not very much plant for the fruit to grow on

Incidentally - I did manage to overwinter one chilli and one sweet pepper plant. I followed the instructions to prune them back. The trouble is that because I cut them back to a single stem about 8" high, as per instructions, when they did start to grow again what I ended up with was that stem with a cluster of shoots from the top rather than having new shoots coming from lower down. Does anyone know how to avoid this?