Celebrating Chilli 2nd Birthday

I can't understand these chilli plants of ours which have live through 2 winters and surprisingly still standing tall. This is what these chilli plants look like early winter this year. Its home is under our porch shade. As you can see the clay soil condition is terrible and need some improvement. Moreover, this area is totally unkept and neglected by us. We don't even feed this plants that much, rarely received liquid fertiliser. We tried growing many different type of plants (extra seedlings) here but none grow that much.

This is how one of the chilli plant look at the moment. I just realised that it has grown new baby leaves to replace the ones that died in winter on the branches. Sometimes it does received some sun but only for a few hours (<2hours?).

Not just new leaves but flowers too. 

These twins are also celebrating their 2nd Birthday. They received full sun. This is how it looks like last April (mid-autumn). These plants starts to fruit late because it was too hot for them to have blooms. Each year to protect these twins, next to them I usually plant cool season vegetable that will grow taller than them .

Planting these plants closely will help to shelter our chilli plants from chill winds and keep them warm like a blanket at night. So this is how the area looks like last August (end-winter). I did a mistake, one of the twins are safely tucked behind these big brassica plants but the other twin was exposed in front. The exposed twin at the moment looks like it is trying its might to revive.

I observed that our chilli plants fruit more in its second year. This is because I think on its first year, we have to wait for the plants to mature (starting from seeds) and when it starts to fruit its already close to autumn. However, treating them as perennials it will start to fruit soon after the weather is warm enough for them. Chilli for thoughts.