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