So every year I tend to still try and grow some peppers. I wait and watch my lovely little seedlings of which ever exotic heirloom I just could not resist from rareseeds.com. Sometimes I get fancy and try starting the seeds indoors early. Sometimes I try pots thinking I can move them around until I find that magic spot they love. Mostly though I just wait for the day some nasty little critter chews the plants off at the ground. As a rule, I never get a single pepper.
This year I tried two of those hanging topsy turvey pepper pots with fish pepper, chinese 5 color, and bird's eye tepin. I started them all indoors in egg cartons (something new for me) then transplanted them and watched them hang on my front porch for two months and not grow more than an inch. Eventually I moved them to stronger sun in the backyard, hanging from some re-purposed A-frame store shelving and they met their demise at the teeth of a crafty ground squirrel. I had also tried a mix of nursery tomatoes and jalapenos I picked up on clearance in 5 gallon tree pots on the same shelving but the ground squirrels and pack rats made short work of those as well.
The pack rats, which are a scourge in my area, were also decimating my seedlings waiting for planting on the front porch. After losing two thirds of what I had bought in a single night, despite putting them on tables, I was fed up. I found a couple pieces of wire mesh hardware cloth in the "random yard and garden stuff" pile and strung them together with fuzzy pipe cleaners to form about 8 feet of barricade. From the same pile came several pieces of pipe from what was once a collapsible canopy that I used years before at the farmers market as a sun shade. Since a good portion of the connectors and other parts had gone missing the remaining pieces of pipe became handy garden stakes. I used the pipe and the mesh to fence in a tiny area at the beginning of the front yard retaining wall, planted what was left of my very gnawed tomato and jalapeno plants, and really gave them no more thought.
Surprisingly, the tiny space was mostly ignored by critters and the plants inside actually thrived and grew. The spot is not terribly sunny, being close to the house it gets a good amount of afternoon shade, and the soil was not particularly great but they still grew. After a while I was actually pulling jalapenos off the plants regularly and sending them of in various zucchini shipments to friends who liked spicy stuff. Hot peppers here get pretty dang hot, something about the watering then wilting in the sun then watering over and over that concentrates the heat. I don't care for hot and using it very sparingly in winter soups to add a warming factor and that is about it. So suddenly I had actually grown some peppers and didn't have the first clue what to do with them.
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| Zucchini Sweet Pickles |
I seeded and sliced some of the peppers and tossed the slices into the freezer for winter soups. Quick and easy but not really exciting and the peppers just kept coming.
I looked up recipes for hot pepper olive oil, thinking it would make spicing up my soups even easier if I could just add a few drops to the meat as it was browning, but the process to make the oil looked so volatile (think vaporized fumes turning the kitchen into a pepper spray chamber) that I soon gave up that idea. In the process, however, I found that you can boil up vinegar and peppers with other spices for a hot pepper vinegar that I figured would work just as well to liven up soup.
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| Jalapeno Vinegar |
Now with as much vinegar on hand as I will probably ever need I have started just stringing peppers on a nylon thread nailed to the ceiling of the kitchen to let them dry and work as decoration as the peppers began to wrinkle and shift from green to shades of red. At least this way if I need some dry hot pepper later I know where to find some!
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