The love for spicy food and hot sauce is real here in the house! I like a good spice in there but others in the house will literally drown everything in spicyness, up to a point where I start looking crooked and not comfortable at all anymore.
Ofcourse there are tons of hot sauces out there which are really good, but I don't like the vinegar taste in there. What is a way better spice is just chopping up some peppers and cooking them with a bit of oil and garlic adding it to your dish. And the best of this is that it is even possible with dried peppers, making it a lot more easy to conserve them for a longer period of this.
What a better thing to do than growing your own peppers in a way that will give you so much fun while doing it as well.
Let's step into the journey of growing that started in April of this year.
How it started
This is how the plants started their journey here. As you can see these are not seeds but already small plants. Peppers are delicate in growing and they need a really specific temperature and circumstances for them to start sprouting. When you live in New Mexico this is not a real issue, but with the cold winters here and shifting temperatures the conditions are not optimal to grow peppers from scratch.
You will need a greenhouse and constant factors like temperature, humidity and sunlight and we don't have that. So...best to start with getting some small plants at the grower. Already the journey of the travel was hard on them, that is how delicate they are.
They started inside the house for a while until they were starting to make flowers that opened up ready for the bees to pass on by.
Bees everywhere!
Now I am lucky to live in a region where a lot of beekeepers are active and the amount of flying creatures is very vivid. Also the combination of having a huge blackberry bush next to it with also at the same moment the flourishing going on is just very helpfull for the pollination proces.
As you can see here, this is what started to happen after the flower is pollinated. A small fruit starts to grow while at the same time there are still a lot of flowers there. This is the Thai Hot pepper or Capsicum Annuum which will make small little peppers perfect for in an Asian dish.
Fun fact: they grow upwards which looks kind of cool as you can see when they are further down the road.
The Cayenne
Next up was the cayenne pepper which is a plant that is a lot more resilient and was the first one to actually start making fruits on there. This one can handle bad weather a lot better actually.
As you can see I just grow them in pots with a diameter of 35 centimeter for the roots to have some space. No greenhouse and no covering and just them standing in the sun. Sure...it would be a lot better if they were indoors with constant temperatures, but this just isn't the case.
The cayennes are slowly turning from green into red and they were actually a lot more spicy than I had expected. Often here in the supermarkt when you buy 'cayennes' you will more of a form of a paprika with you can just eat out of the hand. That doesn't work on these bad boys, they were heavier than expected!
Habanero baby!
Fair enough, I am not that good in keeping stuff alive and even worse I also loose the nametags of what is what. So when the three plants were next to each other I honestly didn't know what kind of pepper was going to come out of them. Indeed....we didn't know what kind of plants we had anymore.
And all of them start green and small so the mystery was still yet to unfold. But when these guys were getting their thick appearance and slowly were starting to grow yellow it was clear that they were habaneros.
With 100.000 to 350.000 points on the Scoville scale these guys are hot dude! Way to hot for me that is, and handle with gloves while cutting them
As you can see here the plant is working and putting all of the energy of the leaves into the fruits to grow them, meaning the plant looks terrible in the end. But the peppers look awesome!
The result!
After 5 months of giving a lot of TLC to the plants (just kidding I didn't do anything actually apart from putting them in the sun and when it was hot giving them a bit of extra water) it was finally time to harvest.
Loving the score of what was given especially considering this was the second batch already.
As you can see these are a lot of peppers and it would be a shame to have to eat them all in three weeks or so before they start to go bad. The best thing to do then is is dry them so you can use them months after wards.
They went in the oven for 4 hours in 95 degrees celsius and they came out dried nicely! A couple of them will go in the grinder to make a nice pepper powder which is just super easy and convenient to use in a lot of dishes.
Sure...you can get a lot more growing pepper when you do this in a greenhouse with constant conditions. But that also needs space and hydrating them at a constant level.
These guys did good in the Dutch weather outdoors and for 5 months of growing this score? I am super proud!!