Ok, so what do you do with hot peppers?

   Two years ago, I took a wild notion to plant about six hot pepper plants.  I think that they were supposed to be jalapenos but as the plants grew, they set the oddest assortment of fruit.  Some were long and slender while others were short and stubby.  I shrugged my shoulders and thought "What difference would it make?  I just needed a few for the "Bayou Fire" tonic for the winter.  The six plants were prolific.  They bore far more peppers than I needed so I set to making hot sauce.  Well, you can only use so much hot sauce.  Those six plants insisted on bearing and bearing with no end in sight.  The shelves in my dining room-turned pantry were now filled to capacity.  (Over a thousand jars of assorted goodies are there for our use!)  What to do?  What to do?  Hmmm!  I shall dehydrate said peppers!  The thought behind this was that dehydrated goods do not take up near the space that canned goods do...so, I pulled the dehydrator down from the top shelf and got to work poking holes in peppers...lots of peppers...way too many peppers.  It did not take long to fill the twelve trays.  It did take long to dry them.  It seems that peppers are obstinate about their state of being and almost refused to become shriveled and dried.  They did, however, so into a half gallon jar, they went!  I felt pretty smug with myself for that idea...until I went out to the herb garden and found a bajillion or so more red peppers.  Ugh!  I was taught to appreciate everything and waste nothing...so I picked peppers.  I dehydrated more.  I now have two gallons of dehydrated hot peppers.

  Like I said, this was two years ago.  Those six plants suddenly became twenty-three plants because I inadvertently dropped a few peppers on the ground.  (Learn from my mistakes here, folks.  Never assume that a dropped pepper will just rot.  They do not.)  I have come to the realization that I am well on my way to having a "pepper grove".  Yes, two years ago, I planted six and now have twenty-three.  I thought sure peppers were annuals not cold hardy perennials.  Even when freezes killed most everything else in the garden, those peppers survived...and thrived.  Now during the third "growing season", I have picked.  I have "candied", preserved, pickled, dehydrated, made sauce and infused vinegars and oils.  I have given bowls of the peppers to neighbors, friends, relatives and even tried to give some to the nice lady at the hospital where I take treatments but she politely declined. Just what I need...no takers. What do I do now?  Just how much appreciation can one show to ever-bearing hot peppers?  Several times, I have been tempted to pull the plants and toss them in the compost but, knowing my luck, they will take root, love the rich soil there and bear more peppers.  I am about hot-peppered out here, folks.  Any suggestions?  

Tabascos Are For The Birds!

   The growing of any kind of hot peppers is something of a novelty for me.  I dehydrate them and use them occasionally...mainly in my herbal cure-all better known as the Bayou Fire.  Yep, the name says it all.  Still, I have no need for buckets of the things.  Obviously, the plants deemed it necessary to provide me with buckets full, regardless of the lack of a need.  A few weeks ago, the scotch bonnets were in full swing and I had to pick hundreds of those plump rascals.  Now, I have jars and jars of dehydrated peppers lining the shelves.  If I have get a hankering for some really hot dish, I have the means to spice it up a bit.

  That was all fine and dandy but now the tabasco pepper (yes, pepper as in single plant) has decided not to be outdone in the production of tiny peppers.  That single plant has over 500 peppers on it!  The only problem is that the sun has not shone for the past ten days so the peppers are not ripening. They are staying pale yellow instead of the fiery red that is desired.  The few that do ripen are snatched up by the birds!  It seems that the mockingbirds love hot peppers!  We had this same problem about 10 years ago.  Mockingbirds started visiting the gardens and picked every pepper that ripened.  At that time, I found it amusing.  I still do.  How in the world can those birds eat hot peppers one after another without setting their mouths on fire??  Tough birds!

  Both types of peppers are growing on plants that were in last year's garden. Last October, I dug the plants and stuck them in the greenhouse where they stayed for the entire winter.  They were plopped back into the ground in the spring and have grown with a fury.  The tabasco pepper is nigh on 4ft tall and is intertwined with the four-o'clock plants.  (Neither of these were supposed to get this big but something happened!)  I am tempted to pick about 100 of the tabasco peppers to see if they will ripen indoors.  If they do, they, along with more scotch bonnets, will be dried.  I sure hope somebody comes along and wants some of these things.  Otherwise, I may just have to start canning hot sauce!  Hmm, now there is an idea!

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.                            

Some Like It Hot!

   On a whim, I planted some hot peppers that Darling Daughter gave to me.  I had grown several types in the past and had good luck drying them for future use but my stash dwindled so it was time to try again.  She had started the seeds during the spring and brought me a dozen or so plants.  "These are Scotch Bonnets so be careful!" she advised.  Sounded like a deal to me since I had grown the Habaneros previously.  Those are about as hot and spicy as the Scotch Bonnets.  Careful was the word.

  Well, the pepper plants did not do much during the summer even though I took good care of them.  Now, however, they are full of peppers!  Each plant (even though small) has quite a number of peppers.  The stock shall be replenished...maybe....or maybe not.  Something is eating the peppers when they turn orange!  What in the world would munch on such a hot pepper?

  Early this morning, I found the culprit.  It seems that during the night, snails are coming from the mulch to eat the spinach plants and top their salad with a spicy bit of pepper.  The snails have been a problem for several years now.  We had bought sacks of mulch one year and those sacks were full of snails.  Ugh!  Thankfully, I am using the recycled hurricane debris as mulch now and the salt in it seems to do a good job of deterring the snails.  I guess it is time for a new layer of debris mulch around the plants.  I never thought anything would bother those peppers!

Grasshoppers, Hot Peppers and Church Windows

  My hikes about the property serve up some pretty interesting finds at times.  I never know if a critter will be lurking in the palmettos, a new plant will surprise me with a bloom or if the rains will give me another treasure from long ago.  This afternoon was much the same.  Surprises abounded with each turn of the hike.  Grasshoppers, hot peppers and church windows do not have much in common except here on the Bayou.  The common factor?  They (or portions of them) are all found in the back yard.  

  First and foremost, were the grasshoppers.  The Eastern Lubber Grasshoppers are all about business this time of year.  They have just about given up munching the garden and have changed goals to mating and egg-laying.  Hundreds upon hundreds of the adult grasshoppers are out and about the hillside.  Each female has dozens of suitors and eventually will lay about a bazillion eggs.  Early spring finds me doing the familiar "Grasshopper Stomp" (the local dance of gardeners) and each summer finds me doing the "Twist and Turn" as I grind the critters to a pulp.  These critters are aggravating as they literally have enough babies to cover the hillside each spring.  The ground looks like it is covered with a black carpet...a black, wiggly carpet.  So, that said, I try to get rid of as many as possible when they are in the adult phase.

  While smacking grasshoppers, I discovered that my forgotten jalapeno peppers were making more peppers than I can possibly use. They are loaded!  I say forgotten because I truly have not cared for the plants since sticking them in the back garden.  Word of advice...never sow an entire packet of hot pepper seeds unless you truly plan on making hot sauce.  These things never die, never quit making peppers and will be loaded with dozens of peppers at any given time.  I suppose canning hot peppers will be on the agenda soon.

  The discovery of hot peppers led me to realize that the garden was also weedy.  Handfuls of weeds were yanked and tossed the wayside.  While tossing one particularly large wad of weeds out of the garden, a glint of blue caught my eye.  The recent downpours had washed the ground to be clean, white sand.  (This sand was washed in on a hurricanes tidal surge.)  The blue was striking against the white sand so I needed to investigate.  Yep, blue glass.  Blue stained glass that had come in with that beach sand.  When Hurricane Katrina demolished everything across the Bay, it swept it all over to our side.  A good bit of the debris wound up on our property.  As near as I can tell, the shards of stained glass came from windows of churches that were demolished in Biloxi. I gathered a dozen or so pieces of glass from the sand this afternoon.  For the most part, these were blues, greens and purples. Over the past twelve years now (since the storm), I have been collecting the shards of colored glass.  Buckets full of the colorful pieces are stored in hopes that some beautiful craft project will become of them.  It seems to be almost a sacrilege to dispose of them.  Surely some use can be made from the once thing of beauty.  I just have to get creative here.

  So my hike turned into quite the intriguing venture.  Now I have to squish grasshoppers, can hot peppers and be creative enough to recycle some beautiful glass into a treasured piece. It can be done...it can be done.

Just Another Relaxing Day in the Garden

  So I hear tell that gardening is supposed to be relaxing.  It gets you outside in the fresh air, gives a good bit of exercise and gives you a sense of accomplishment.  While all are true and all are good for your health, sometimes things can seem to be just the opposite.  Instead of relaxing, there times when the work is too strenuous, the smell of cow poop being used as fertilizer is rank and that sense of accomplishment goes right out the window.  Today....today.

  I needed more garden space than I had available since the seedlings in the greenhouse were outgrowing their tiny pots.  Recently, Son had created a "bog" for one of the clue hunts we hold each October.  This bog was nothing more than a terraced water garden lined with some heavy plastic.  The thing was still partially intact and needed some definite help.  He had the bright idea of renovating said bog into an herb patch.  Sounded good to me so we set to work.  As I cleaned out the "bog's" plastic lining and any remaining plants, he turned the soil and made rows. Each row was filled with a hefty layer of cow poop.  Smelly! The place looked pretty good after three hours of heavy labor.  That relaxing gardening bit was starting to be the furthermost thing from my mind.  I wiped beads of sweat from my brow and guzzled another glass of cool water.  

  Finally, one section of the terrace was ready for planting.  Son fetched a tray of seedlings from the greenhouse.  This tray contained hot peppers. Good enough.  They would occupy the first section of the garden.  He dipped buckets of water from the Frog Pond (added nutrients!) and filled each row with several inches of the murky water.  My job was to transplant the peppers.  No problem!  We made quick work of this part of the chore.  With my head bent near the earth (and the mixture of pond water and cow poop), I needed constant reminding that being outdoor breathing the (fresh) air is healthy!

  Then there was that sense of accomplishment.  Yep, we had completed one part of the terrace planting and it looked great!  The tiny pepper plants were all sitting perkily in their new beds and....wait a minute! Where were my plants???  I let out a gasp of disbelief.  Several of my freshly planted pepper plants were topped off and were laying flat on the ground!  Horrors!  Son and I surveyed the matter and soon found the culprit!  A cutworm had already lopped of three plants!  I lopped him. Smack! Squish! Ugh!  Stupid worm!  Groan!  I suppose by tomorrow morning more of my peppers will have met their demise at the hands...uh..jaws..mouths(?) of evil cutworms.  I will replant but will follow Pop's method of putting an tin can (both ends opened) around each plant.  Lets just see the cutworm chew through that!  

  Yep, gardening is relaxing.  Right...fun times in the backyard for sure!  Yep, I love it!

Hot Peppers!

  Our weather has been absolutely perfect, if you ask me.  It warms nicely during the day but the nighttime sees temperatures near freezing.  I love it!  While that might be so, I am not too sure that my garden shares my sentiments.  So, feeling sorry for the bell pepper plants, I was nice and covered them with blankets.  So far, this has worked.  I am still picking bell peppers in mid January!  At this time of year, I am delighted to have any fresh produce so the pepper plants are treated with kid gloves, so to speak.  

  I was upstairs doing a bit of painting near the window on the south side.  The warm sunshine was streaming through the glass making it the perfect spot to paint yet take advantage of a gorgeous view.  This window overlooks the garden and beyond that...the Bayou and Bay.  It makes for quicker work if I am happy while doing it.  I made the remark to Son (who was cutting trim boards for the windows) that I needed to remove the blankets covering the peppers.  "Tonight is probably going to be the last of cold nights, so the blankets can be stored back in the greenhouse," I reminded him.  At that very moment, he pointed out at the garden. "You have hot peppers," he said.  This made me giggle.  Sure enough, though, the peppers were probably quite warm just not "hot" as usually used in connection with peppers.  They were warm from having a "heater" near them! 

  Some time after I let Ms. Nycto, the Bayou Princess Cat, out for the morning, she had decided that the blanket covering the peppers was her bed.  She had snuggled up to take a nap in the warm sunshine.  While this is all fine and dandy for the cat, I suppose my pepper plants were feeling a tad squished! Ms. Nycto is quite a hefty princess!  Oh well, it could be worse, I suppose.  She could have been smashing the spinach!

Hot Stuff!

   It works!  I am ecstatic!  It actually works! It burns!  I am not so ecstatic!  It REALLY BURNS!  By "it" I mean the potion that I created!  No, not any mysterious potion but rather a spray for the garden.  The tomato plants were quickly being made into green lace by some weird, little worms. Son and I handpicked all of the tomato (tobacco) worms and felt that we had ended a problem but, in reality, one had only begun.  Teeny, tiny worms were eating massive holes in the leaves of every plant. Something had to be done quickly!  So we turned to the internet to find an herbal potion to spray on the garden.  I am not one that condones the use of chemical sprays or powders but those worms were quite greedy. Michael found several sites that claimed that their herbal method was the best.  What did we do?  We combined them all into one huge recipe! Into the pot went garlic, onion and a bunch of different peppers.  A bit of water added to the pot and we were in business!  The whole mess was heated and then let sit for several hours. Whew!  This stuff even smelled hot!  I blended the concoction and then let it sit overnight.  This morning, the stuff was strained and poured into a spray bottle.  I added some dish washing liquid and headed out to test the gunk.

  Sure enough, those worms were doing a grand job of turning my tomato leaves in to lace.  Some plants had very little leaf left!  The time for testing was at hand!  (Or in hand!)  I turned a leaf upside down so we could observe the little varmints first hand.  The fiery stuff spewed from the spray bottle on to the leaves and my hand.  Duh...hey!  This stuff burned a bit!  That was when we noticed the worms starting to squirm. Their writhing soon turned violent and a few actually fell from the plant. Ha!  The stuff was working!  I sprayed another plant before Michael made the observation that "If it is so hot that it kills worms, does it kill the plant?" Uh, oh.  I had no clue.  To be on the safe side, we decided to let the plants sit for a while.  In the morning, if the two that I sprayed have not withered beyond recognition, I will spray the rest of the garden.  (As of late this evening, the plants look none the worse for wear!  Tomorrow the spray bottle shall be wielded yet again!)

  On a whim, I sprayed some to the yucky Eastern Lubber Grasshoppers with the molten lava-like goop.  Five of these critters had descended upon one of my daylilies.  Immediately after dousing them, the smallest of the five fell to the ground.  No squirming, no writhing, just instant death.  Wow!  It took a few minutes before the other four finally succumbed but my new found brew had done the job! NOTHING kills these things this quickly!  I was elated to say the least!  Of the billion or so Eastern Lubber Grasshoppers that hatched earlier in the spring, a million or so are still wreaking havoc on my plants!  Aha!  Take that, you varmints!  

  Now for any of you who wish to try my secret potion, I will share our recipe!  Just be warned....this stuff does BURN!  DO NOT GET IT ON YOUR BODY AND ESPECIALLY NOT IN YOUR EYES!  Duh...folks this is made with hot peppers and does hurt like crazy but if you are still adamant about trying it, the recipe follows.

Bug Burning Sauce

1 quart water
1 medium onion..cut in chunks
6 cloves garlic...smashed
6 Habanero Peppers
6 Jalapeno Peppers
1/3 cup Cayenne Pepper powder

3 Tablespoons Dawn Dish washing liquid

  In a medium pot, place the water, onion, garlic, Habanero Peppers, Jalapeno Peppers and the Cayenne Pepper.  There is no need to peel the onion or garlic. Bring this to a boil and turn off the heat.  Let sit until cool.  In a blender, mix until all of the large chunks are gone. Return to pot. Cover and let sit overnight.  The next day, strain the mixture and pour into spray bottle.  Add the dish washing liquid.  Do NOT shake. Gently turn from side to side to incorporate the two.  Your spray is now ready to kill some bugs or worms!  Hopefully, it won't kill the plants!  

DO NOT GET ON YOURSELF OR PETS!!!! THIS STUFF DOES BURN!!!  DEFINITELY KEEP IT AWAY FROM CHILDREN!!!!

Update!!!!!  This stuff did burn the tomato leaves but only time will tell if it actually kills the plant.  Good news is...no worms on these plants!  I will try diluting it a bit. If it still kills critters without burning plants, all will be good! At least there are no worms to multiply into lovely, egg-laying adults!

Peter Piper Picked a Peck!

Peter Piper picking that peck of pickled peppers has nothing on me..I actually pickled those peppers! Somehow I seemed to have planted a whole lot more hot peppers than Bell Peppers this year. In all, there are some thirty pepper plants but the bigger lot of these are a strange assortment of the hot variety. In the garden, all of these are doing quite well and I have dried a number of the fruit. The dried peppers will be strung and hung or stored in jars for later use. I grew tired of impaling the peppers on the metal skewers. The smell of the air-drying peppers did keep the sinuses clear but I was forever having to tell visitors to "don't touch". Even though it was quite apparent that these were of the hot sort..they were like a magnet to curious onlookers. Everyone wanted to "feel" the drying peppers! Not too smart as even dried peppers can burn the skin and eyes. This said, I needed a different approach to preserving my peppers which led to today's task. Actually, the procedure started yesterday with the washing, piercing and soaking the peppers. Before pickling, they required soaking in a salt-water brine for about eighteen hours. The piercing (cutting slits in the sides) allows for the salt brine and later vinegar to seep inside the pepper. Uh huh...yep, I just want to hold multiple of hot peppers and cut slits in them. Perhaps one of the curious folks that were adamant about handling the drying peppers would volunteer for the job. Not one could be found that would take the task. I looked for a pair of latex gloves..none of those could be found either. Oh well, I am not very adept while wearing gloves anyway and would have probably pierced the hand and not the pepper. Ingenuity came into play! I used tongs! Grasping the pepper with the tongs, I was able to stab it with the knife blade straight through the slot in the the tongs! Ahhh..that worked! The stabbing went quickly once I discovered the new method! After soaking overnight, I was ready to pickle! Now where were all of the folks that wanted to handle the peppers? Not one could be found to take the task. I had to pack the peppers into the jars. I tried the tongs again! Trying to maneuver the peppers into the jar with tongs proved impossible. Just imagine trying to play that Claw Machine in the front of the store. You know, the one where there is a cute stuffed panda that your kid "just has to have" and the object is to pick it up with the mechanical claw and drop it in the chute. Yeah..that was me with tongs and hot peppers..it wasn't working. With no gloves, I was in a quandary! Then a thought! Improvise! I searched the cabinet for a plastic baggie! After slipping my hand into the baggie, I was able to pack the jars quite nicely! Aha! I am smarter than the average Habanero Pepper! Into the jars went the Habaneros, Jalapenos, Chilis and Hot Banana Peppers! Such a pretty assortment..greens, yellows, oranges and reds..all made for a beautiful jar! The rest of the canning was easy! Now there are jars of hot peppers ready to go on the shelf. Later, during Winter, the peppers will be used in pots of chili as a cold weather warmer!

Speaking of greens, yellows, oranges and reds...the Fall decorations are going up nicely! I decorated the stair rails with garlands of Fall leaves. These are crepe paper leaves that I picked up at the local dollar store. They are single leaves which seem to work better than the artificial garlands merely because of the storage problem. I can flatten and store these all in a small shoebox size box versus the large containers of garland. Being as the Bayou House is sort of rustic, the entryway has acquired decorations with real gourds, dried grasses and more Fall leaves. Now..I still have to find a place for my Scarecrow Family!

Some like it HOT!

I have a penchant for hot peppers! I do like spicy foods but my liking for these jewels are more for the health properties that they possess. Hot peppers contain the wonderful chemical called capsaicin. It is actually this chemical that gives the peppers their "heat"! It is the capsaicin that causes the burning sensation in your mouth when you bite into a hot pepper. The only pepper that does not contain this chemical is the Bell Pepper and that is because this pepper is a cultivar of another and has a recessive gene that eliminates the hot "taste". Capsaicin is highly valued in herbal remedies as a circulatory stimulant and an analgesic. It is this same chemical that is the base for the "pepper" spray that is used by the police force as a non-lethal method to incapacitate a person. But..as I said..I like the peppers mainly for their medicinal uses!

In the garden, the several varieties of hot peppers that I planted this Spring have finally taken off and started to grow. The rains must be agreeing with the plants that it is time to set fruit..and set they are! It looks as if this will be a good year for peppers with a bumper crop. With this new found abundance, I needed to discover a method of preserving hot peppers. Once before we had so many that we did not know what to do with all of them. We gave peppers to anyone who would accept them, we froze some (BIG mistake!) and we tried our hand at making hot sauce! About the BIG mistake..never freeze hot peppers along side of anything that you do not want hot! Everything in our freezer took on the unmistakable burn of hot peppers! (Habanero flavored ice cream is not that tasty!) Perhaps this was due to me using freezer bags and not some sturdier container but I vowed then and there never to freeze hot peppers again! As for the hot sauce..it was a success in flavor but a word of advice...never cook it inside! My oldest son and I cleaned gallons of peppers and started cooking them in a large stainless steel pot on the stove. After just a few minutes though, our eyes were burning like fire! In an attempt to save our hot sauce and our eyes, we transferred the sauce to two large electric slowcookers and moved them to the porch. That sauce smelled up the entire yard! Years later, anything we cooked in the slowcookers had the distinct flavor of hot peppers just like everything in the freezer!

This year, I am trying to dry the peppers on a rack. I do not want to put them in the dehydrator for the same reason as the slowcookers! I have skewered a couple dozen of the assorted peppers on stainless steel skewer and placed them on the same drying rack that I have been using for drying the persimmon leaves. I am hoping that I have enough space between the two that my tea is not fiery hot! Come to think about it..pickled peppers might be the next attempt at preserving my hot peppers. Hopefully, pickling will not lessen the capsaicin strength in the peppers. Pickled peppers, anyone? Where is Peter Piper when you need him??