Growing Peppers in the Auk Mini: Tips for Success

A while ago I posted about how my peppers and chillis were not producing much. I went over to the Auk site and read about growing peppers in the Auk Mini. I learned that I should have put maximum 1 or 2 plants in the Mini and not the 3 I have now. The combination of a chilli plant, a bell pepper plant and a cherry tomato plant was a bad choice. Of course too late to change that now. They mentioned to prune back the plants to the height of the lamp of the mini and to shake regularly to help with pollination. I went ahead and did this and it has generated some success. The bell pepper plant had a lonely fruit for weeks and now it suddely bears a small cluster of bell peppers, one of them also starting to turn red. The chilli plant now also has more chillis and even the tomato plant has more tomatoes than before. I tested the first 2 chillis in a dish yesterday and they are mildly spicy. Not super hot but spicy enough to add a noticeable kick to a dish. This was one main motivation to try out the Auk Mini, growing my own chillis. We use them quite a lot buying them in the supermarket but there is huge variability in how spicy they are. Supposedly they are always the same but in terms of spiciness they vary wildly from putting one in the dish making it hot to putting 3 in and wondering if you forgot to add them at all. I am curious if these home grown ones are a little more constant in their taste.