Chilli peppers are averaging $53.9/kg this week. That’s down 20.3% on the 23-day baseline of $67.63/kg. The shelf is cheaper than it’s been all month, and I still reckon the smarter move is to grow your own. If you’re tracking the same move on other heat crops, I logged the recent capsicum drop and the earlier chilli softening the same way.
Here’s the maths I’m running. A single plant gives me a few hundred grams of chilli over a season, sometimes a kilo if the summer’s kind. At $53.9/kg that’s $30 to $50 of fruit off one plant. A punnet of seedlings costs me about $4. I get six plants from it. So I’m looking at $180 to $300 of chilli for the price of a cuppa and some patience.
What the shelf says today
This week’s Brisbane shelf prices are tight across the two majors:
- Woolworths: $53.54/kg
- Coles: $54.25/kg
That’s a 1.3% gap on the same produce, so 71 cents a kilo between them. Not worth driving across town for. The prices are Brisbane sourced, but the direction of a move like this usually runs national, so if you’re in Perth or Hobart your aisle has probably softened too. I track every crop this way on the price tracker, and the features page shows how the baseline maths works. The drop is the story, not the dollar.
Where I’d plant, and when
Chilli is a heat crop. It wants warm soil and a long run, so the zone you’re in changes everything about timing. The plant now calendar will tell you what your zone can take this week, and the climate zone growing guides carry the full sowing windows for each region.
If I were in the subtropics (Brisbane, northern NSW), I’d be sowing now into trays on a warm windowsill. June is too cold to direct sow, but I want seedlings ready to go out the moment the soil warms in late August. I plant mine in the warmest bed I’ve got, up against a north-facing fence that holds the afternoon sun.
In cool temperate zones (Melbourne, Tassie, the tablelands), I wouldn’t bother sowing yet. My frosts aren’t done. I’d wait until September or October, start seed indoors under a grow light or on top of the fridge for bottom heat, then transplant after the last frost. Chilli sulks in cold ground, so there’s no prize for rushing it.
Sourcing wise, a $4 packet of seed gives me more plants than I can use and keeps for two or three seasons in the fridge. Seedlings cost more but skip the fiddly germination, and they’re worth it in the cool zones where my growing window is short.
One plant pays for the punnet ten times over. The only hard part is remembering to pick them before they go soft on the bush.
