Late Spring

Late Spring has brought with it hot temperatures and an explosion of growth in our little garden.  As I write this, today's heat index is 100 degrees... and the chilies love it.  Hopefully, here is a preview of what is to come from our little 8x8 foot garden.  This year I planted 4 tomato plants (yellow grape, black cherry, sun gold, beauty heirloom), 4 chilies (serrano, jalapeno, chile de arbol, coloro cascabella) and some herbs.  Based on the yellow grape tomato flowers (above) we'll be getting a nice bounty this year.  The black cherry tomato (below) plant is winning the race on fruit production and I hope to get some tomatoes in the next couple of weeks.  I can't wait!

Garden Time #4: ignitarious de mouthus

I never took Latin in high school but if I did, I might know a better way to say "a hot pepper will singe your mouth." As it is, I'll stick to my best guess.

Anyway, here's an update on our prolific chile de arbol plant. It was giving us so many little red fiery chiles I had to do something with them or else I would risk spoilage before I had a chance to use them all. I contemplated pickling, which is certainly an easy and a worthy thing to do with peppers of all kinds but it required more work than I wanted to do at the time. The next best solution was to dry them. I knew that de arbol chiles took well to drying so all I needed was a needle and thread. I simply picked the ripe chiles and strung a needle and thin thread through the stem end. It is as simple as that. These are hanging over our kitchen sink area but are well out of the way of daily chores.

As you can see in the picture, the chiles are quite wrinkled already but they aren't quite dry enough to crush and crumble into a jar. When they are I will have my own jar of crushed red pepper for use in all kinds of dishes.

Garden Time #3

The tangled mess that are our tomato plants have finally decided that they want to give up their bounty. If you're a backyard vegetable gardener like myself you no doubt know that the tomato season is upon us. There are plenty of green tomatoes still waiting for the extra plant sugars and sunlight to brighten them into their various shades of red, purple, or orange, but at the rate that they ripen it won't take long!

Here's a prodigious bowl of produce from our garden. The red tomatoes are a variety popular in Europe called Carmello, the brownish looking ones are Black Pear, and the small, orange grape sized tomatoes are called Sun Gold. The Sun Gold are my favorite. They have the highest brix level of all the tomatoes that our particular nursery carried. The red chilies are Chile de Arbol: a nice fiery chile related to the cayenne. A little salt, pepper, and perhaps some fresh mozzarella if you're in the mood, and you've got a great salad.