A little bit ago I visited Kevin Malon’s field of peppers at Rock’s Farm and Garden (located at 10935 Route 306, Kirkland, Ohio 44026, did you know the 90 East has an exit for Route 306? I sure as heck didn’t). I promised to have an update for when his Open Fields would be and well, here it is.

Starting this Saturday and Sunday (and continuing until some time around November) from 10AM to 5PM you can stop by and pick as much peppers as your refrigerator (or dehydrator) can hold. At $3 a pound (for most types) it’s practically a steal! Kevin (and helper Matthew Barris) will also have Bhut Jolokias for sale, but you have to ask for them…they are in very high demand this year. Be sure to ask to see his 13 year old Tepin plant, it’s an amazing sight to behold.

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It was a dark and stormy night…well, not really. I’ve just always wanted to start something out like that. Actually, it was a hot, bright, and sunny day and I was driving out to a local farm in Kirkland, Ohio. After a 45 minute drive with the A/C on full blast I had arrived at my destination; Rock’s Farm and Garden.

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This year’s growing season is truly off and running, and we couldn’t be more pleased with how the container garden is coming along with their growth. This wasn’t without a few hiccups, though. We’ve had a couple of casualties, which we hadn’t had in years past. As has been our tradition, we ordered our plants from the nice folks at Cross Country Nurseries. One of our two Bhut Jolokia plants were pretty much DOA, and we had another plant, a cayenne, die of transplant shock shortly after the switch to the bigger containers. Gotta give credit where it’s due, though. Janie from CCN was awesome in sending us some replacement plants for the Bhut Jolokia plant…and even sent us two plants in place of the one that perished. Certainly a good thing, since we’re down to just the one cayenne pepper plant! See the rest of the pics to view how our babies are doing….

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It’s been a little bit since my last installment so I thought I might update you all with a new article.

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Well, our shipment of pepper plants finally arrived today from Cross Country Nurseries. For several years now, we’ve made the decision to grow our peppers in containers. Part of that stems from not having a decent garden space to grow them in actual soil in the ground. For one thing, the soil here in the midwestern U.S. is terrible for peppers. It has a high clay content, which makes planting problematic unless you till the soil and add some more sand and/or peat to soften it up. That fact, plus not having any part of our yard that has dedicated space for plants like this make containers the path of least resistance.

We’ve also made the mistake in years past of getting pepper plants of varieties that we really couldn’t use or didn’t grow all that well. So, this year we decided to go back to basics and get a lot of “staple” chile peppers and see what we could do with the peppers that we know well, both from growing and cooking/preparation perspectives. Here’s what we have for this year:
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Well, I admit, I slacked off this week on the reviews, sorry folks. Now I didn’t slack of on sampling sauces, just writing. Another thing I didn’t slack off on though was prepping this years crop!

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Mark McMullan has been a supporter of this blog for quite some time, and we use his pepper database often, particularly around growing season when we need information about different kinds of chile peppers. Mark’s site, thechileman.org, is an amazing compilation of online information. Check out the latest update from Mark about his site:

With the chilli seed planting season now firmly upon us chilli growers and hot food lovers around the world are switching their thoughts to what varieties to grow this season. With so many different peppers to choose from which peppers are the tastiest for homemade curries? What’s the difference between Jalapeno and a Habanero? Where do the worlds hottest peppers come from and just how do you grow them?

These were just some of the questions which crossed the mind of Mark McMullan and Julian Livsey, two self confessed ‘chilli heads’ from the UK almost 2 years ago which has since led to the development of one of the worlds top chilli pepper websites: www.thechileman.org

The birth of www.thechileman.org
In 1996 Dave DeWitt wrote the Inspirational ‘Peppers of the World: An Identification Guide’ which described 315 popular Chile pepper varieties. ‘We thought it would be good idea to raise the bar even further’ said Mark. Chillies, chile, chilli, paprika, capsicums or peppers, it doesn’t matter what you call them or how you spell them, over the last two years we have amassed detailed information and photographs on over 3700 varieties!

thechileman database
The websites ‘Jewel in the Crown’ is ‘thechileman database’ the largest of its kind in the world and can be found on the following link:
http://www.thechileman.org/search.php
The database is ‘intelligent’ in that it has been built to help you find what your looking for even if you don’t know the varieties name said Julian, thechileman.org web designer. You can sort the 3714 varieties currently listed by name, heat, origin, species or a combination of all four. It also contains a clever piece of technology which can convert the database into nearly 10 languages for the benefit of Chinese, Portuguese, Korean, Spanish, Arabic, Italian, Japanese, German, French and Italian speakers.

Thechileman.org needs your help
Over the last 2 years, ‘the chilemen’ have gradually built up the site in their spare time for the benefit of anyone with an interest in peppers. It is ‘not for profit’ and we only sell a few bottles of our homemade Naga ‘Snakebite’ Chilli sauce to help meet the sites rising hosting costs said Mark. Despite the web sites success, which received 5.3 million ‘hits’ from over 131,000 visitors from 174 different countries and territories in 2007 alone, it is under constant development.

Currently we are looking for ‘missing images’ to help make the database even more complete with all images used credited to the photographer said Mark.
If you have noticed that they have classed a chilli as originating in Botswana when in fact it is native to neighboring Zimbabwe, have contributions to support the project or would simply like to leave some feedback, you can contact them directly via the database page.

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Mark
www.thechileman.org

One of our very first contributors to this blog has made a triumphant return to the blogosphere…if only with his homemade hot sauces. Chuk Hell…musician, baker, rock star-in-training, raconteur, and hot sauce maker extraordinaire has sent us a tetralogy of unique homemade sauces to delight our palates and torture our taste buds. To this day, Chuk’s “Ogoun” sauce was the best-tasting and hottest homemade sauce I’d ever tried. It will be interesting to see how these new ones stack up to that one-of-a-kind creation.
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Just when we thought that we had issues with growing our own peppers, we ran across this article from the Las Cruces Sun-News about the manpower vs. technology issues of the chile pepper cultivation out in New Mexico. Hey, at least we still pick our own peppers by hand. Granted that’s from like 12 plants or so…

Mechanized chile harvesting could ensure future of N.M. crop
By the Associated Press
12/25/2007 12:00:00 AM MST

LAKE ARTHUR, N.M. - A handful of farm laborers are busy at work on a warm day in mid-November, helping harvest 140 acres of Cecil Conklin’s red chile crop. But at this southeastern New Mexico farm, the workers aren’t stooped over hand-picking the peppers - they’re driving Conklin’s mechanical chile harvester as it plows through row after row of chile plants, methodically pulling off the peppers.

“The machine harvests about seven acres a day,” said Conklin, one of the first farmers in New Mexico to make the switch to mechanical harvesting more than a decade ago. “That’s about the same acreage that it took 40-50 workers to pick each day before we had the machine.

Mechanization “was forced on us - we couldn’t find the labor. Now, chile definitely has to be mechanically harvested in order for farmers to make money,” he said.

Increased market pressure from foreign chile imports, declining prices and lack of labor have made it tough for chile farmers to thrive. Using machines to harvest the state’s signature crop is the only way the $400 million chile industry can stay competitive, said Terry Crawford, professor of agriculture business and economics at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces.

Click here to read the rest of the source article from the Las Cruces Sun-News

There was a great article to appear in the most recent e-newsletter from Fiery-Foods.com today. Harald Zoschke, owner of Pepperworld.com and part-time author for the Hot Zone Online, did a great writeup about a comparison of the various incarnations of the Jolokia peppers: Bhut, Bih, and Morich. When taste-testing is part of the equation, it’s entertaining to see this kind of quote:

I couldn’t resist sampling one of those green pods and took a good bite. Big mistake! To protect the fruit from undesired eaters, plenty of capsaicin is already present in their immature state. And this seems to be especially true for those Nagas.

We’ve tried the raw Jolokias, and their heat is pretty formidable. Hard to imagine trying them times three in a short period of time.

You can also see the extensively updated main Jolokia article, called “Saga Jolokia”, by clicking on this link:

http://www.fiery-foods.com/dave/sagajolokia.asp

Enjoy!

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