Last Year's Hot Peppers!

   Last spring, Darling Daughter brought me a couple dozen "hot pepper" plants.  She said there was a combination of tabasco peppers and scotch bonnet peppers.  Alrighty, then.  I suppose I never thought much about hot peppers as being anything but hot.  So....I planted hot peppers in the garden.  Spring turned to summer and that waned into fall.  Those plants made exactly five peppers and, believe it or not, the snails ate those.  Hmmm.  Something was surely amiss with the pepper plants but, since winter has a way of killing fragile plants, I dug up each of the surviving plants, potted them and stuck them in the greenhouse.  There, they sat besides some tomato plants that, on a whim, I dug and potted. What was I thinking?  These were just more things for me to tend over the winter months.  Sort of dumb.

  Anyway, come this spring, I planted all of those things back into the garden.  Surprisingly, the year old tomato plants bloomed and set tomatoes almost immediately!  Woohoo!  The peppers sat dormant.  Last month, however, as the tomatoes withered...the peppers started thriving!  Yes!  Now I had hot peppers....lots of hot peppers....too many hot peppers!  What can you do with an overload of the things?  I quickly found out that you do NOT want to put them in the dehydrator in the middle of the kitchen with no vent fan.  Nope..NEVER DO THAT!  EVER!  NEVER EVER!  Just take my word on it...don't do it.

  Thankfully, Darling Daughter made the offhanded comment that her pepper plants did not survive and she would love "some" peppers.  YES!  Tomorrow, a box of peppers is heading to her house.  I hope she is ready.  I have some sixty plus on the table and will pick that many more before sending the box to her.

  While the tabasco peppers are not extremely hot on the scale of "pepper hotness", those scotch bonnets rate pretty high up there in heat.  In comparison...using the Scoville scale, tabascos range around 30,000 to 40,000 while the scotch bonnets go at a whopping 100,000 to 350,000 (heat units).  Yep, that is quite a difference!  

  Being as this pepper is so hot, what in the world possessed me to even agree to have it in the garden?  Every time I am out there picking the peppers, I have to marvel at that fact.  What was I thinking?  No, I do not wear gloves to pick the peppers even though I strongly advise the use.  I am sure that some day I shall make the mistake of wiping the sweat from my brow and will regret the lack of good judgement.