GROWING BLACK COBRA HOT PEPPERS IN YOUR GARDEN

a pepper variety that is easy to grow looks amazing and produces a lot of hot peppers let's look at growing the black cobra pepper also known as goats weed or the Vietnamese dragon pepper we bought our black Cobra pepper plants from the 99-cent store at Foothill Ranch California and these come in these plastic pots and need to be transplanted into either a container or a raised bed we will be planting our pepper plants in our raised beds and in mid-march the danger of frost has gone in this zone in Southern California and it's a good time to plant peppers now we have a lot of organic matter in the raised bed you can see some roots here from the onions we harvested and don't worry about the extra plant roots they will decompose and become organic matter so as you can see here we have a lot of organic matter we have some perlite as well for added drainage and this is the kind of soil that peppers love and what we are going to do is just plant them in a planting hole after loosening the soil little bit we have used these supports these are supports for the pepper plants and they're totally optional but I just think they give better structure to your plant now by end of May you can see that the pepper plant has taken off and you can see a lot of new leaves and lot of new growth and this is exactly why you need to plant your pepper plants in advance like the earliest you can because it has a very long growing season now you can see here that the soil is a little dry at the base and this is how you should water your pepper plants they do not need to be watered every day at least in the spring season in the summer season depending on the conditions you may want to water it every day but they like to have dry feet and they don't like to be over watered so just make sure you're watering your pepper plants well just dig in a little bit into the soil and see if there's enough moisture if not you can go ahead and water your pepper plant now in mid-june you can see that the plant has grown pretty tall and is also producing a lot of flowers this is the time where you will also see that the plant has some white hair like growth and that is very normal for this pepper plant it's just a characteristic of this hot pepper variety now make sure you choose a sunny location for your pepper plant it requires at least about 6 to 8 hours of sunlight every day so make sure you choose a sunny location now as far as insects and diseases go we did not see any insects attacking this pepper plant and this plant did not have any diseases as well so I guess this pepper is so hot that insects and diseases stay away from this pepper plant and you can see here the flowers up close they're beautiful they're self pollinating and they turn into pepper pods very quickly and these plants grow very tall you can see that by end of June these plants are quite tall and the peppers have started forming now these peppers form facing vertically up as you can see here and they form these peppers that are so beautiful to look at and this is a very unique pepper variety the pepper starts out as green it then becomes dark green to black and then finally it turns red so very interesting pepper variety for those of you who are wondering how hot this pepper is this pepper is really hot it is 20,000 to 40,000 Scoville heat units which means that they're about 5 times to 15 times hotter than jalapenos this pepper is also known by a lot of different names like the goats weed pepper or the Vietnamese black dragon pepper and of course the black Cobra pepper and it's sold as the black Cobra pepper at most of the places here in the United States now you can see the pods then we harvesting the pods you can see that they've started becoming black and that's why this pepper is called the black Cobra pepper you can see the pods are pretty good-looking and extremely hot now this pepper variety produces abundantly it produced hundreds and hundreds of peppers in this pepper plant and we were growing two pepper plants and we got so many peppers that we could not keep up with the consumption of the amount of peppers this plant was producing now once again you can see that the peppers are extremely good-looking quite big in size and it reminds me of the bird's eye chili pepper but just a slightly larger version of that and once again here it is the black Cobra pepper quite an amazing pepper that's very easy to grow and produces abundant harvests now as far as fertilizers go you can feed your plant a mix of fish emulsion and seaweed every three weeks during the growing season if you prefer to use salt based fertilizers you can drench your plant with a water soluble tomato or vegetable fertilizer every three weeks or so during the growing season and it will produce great peppers now some soils especially in Southern California are very deficient in magnesium so bathing your plant with an Epsom salt solution once in a month or once in two months adds a lot of magnesium and sulfur to the soil and results in much higher pepper yields now once the pepper starts turning red as you can see here it goes from a green to a black to a red there reach the end of their life and you need to start harvesting your peppers now because some of these peppers might get dry very quickly so as you can see here this one dried very quickly and because of that what happened was we started noticing and we started harvesting the peppers a lot earlier then they turned into this stage so as you can see here there are a lot of red peppers on this plant and we're starting to harvest these red peppers now what I did notice was that this pepper was hottest when it was black in color and then it turned slightly mild when it was red but it wasn't a big difference these peppers are still very hot peppers so no matter what stage you harvest this pepper at you're gonna get very hot peppers so here you can see the plump red peppers that we are harvesting and at this stage you can harvest these peppers and use them or you can dry them in the Sun and prepare chili powder out of it I will have a separate video showing you how to make your own chili powder at home homemade chili powder is amazing it just tastes so fresh and nice and you can use any kind of hot pepper to make your own chili powder at home and here you can see the harvest looks amazing these are very nicely sized peppers and they will keep producing these peppers produced right from June and all the way through August they're still producing and I'm sure it's gonna keep producing for another couple of months at least and I'm gonna try and overwinter this pepper variety and see if it can withstand the winter it is a pretty amazing producer so I might try to prune it and then see if I can either move it to a container or just let it grow in the raised bed so there we have it folks that was our episode and the plant profile of the black Cobra pepper if you have grown this pepper variety do let us know in the comments box below also let us know if you are planning to grow this pepper variety now that you have seen it we'll see you again soon happy gardening