ty ty ty I'm having SO much fun with these I got from the party. The paprika peppers is going INSANE since sir Thor cut one off mistaking them for the black Hungarian. I have that pepper lying on the counter in the kitchen. When I go in, I pick it up and sniff it. Smells so good even though it's still yeller. I'll do something with it soon, I'm sure.

These are all first fruits and we got off to a late start, here because of the rains and moving the garden.

With peppers, late starts don't matter. That's the good news! lol

Paprikas will exhaust you in a good year, and they still produce pretty heavily even in a bad drought year.

I used to grow too many peppers, a result of trying to have enough plants in the ground that it didn't matter if a year gave us 100+ degrees all summer, and total rainfall for the year of 18-24". If you have enough plants and you can water, even in a summer like that you'll get lots of peppers, so I gradually cut back on the number of pepper plants in the ground over the years as I learned I still could get a huge harvest from relatively few plants. I used to exhaust myself from July through September just trying to keep up with harvesting and processing the harvest.

In an epic pepper year, I was still trying to finish up the tomatoes while peppers piled up all over the kitchen. Tim was out of town and I had no help, and I started doubting I'd ever get them all processed before they went bad. I froze a whole lot of them that year, canned, dehydrated and ate as many as possible as quickly as possible. When Tim was away, out of irritation at being home alone with a house rapidly filling with peppers, I took the time to count them all, and had a little over 1800 so that I could tell him how many pepeprs there were and make him feel bad for being away while the pepper harvest was peaking. Almost a thousand of those peppers were bird peppers, which you can dehydrate and freeze easily. I probably dehydrated/froze a lifetime supply of them that year as they are very hot and, if you're making a batch of home-made salsa for fresh-eating that day, it only takes 1 or 2 bird peppers to make it very hot indeed. I haven't planted bird peppers since then, but had volunteers for 4 or 5 years after that.

When I first started canning peppers on their own, other than using them in salsa and Habanero Gold Jelly, I made jalapeno pepper rings. Having many peppers left after than, I roasted and froze chipotles for days and days, one batch per day. Having many more jalapenos even after that, I made both red jalapeno jelly and green jalapeno jelly. (You cannot mix red and green jalapenos together for jelly or you end up with a jelly that may taste great, but looks like brown slime.) We still had jalapenos, so I made Honeyed Jalapenos. Still more jalapenos kept finding their way into the kitchen, so I started making candied jalapenos. I make about 100 jars a year because we often give them away at Christmas time (or, lol, any other time of the year our friends are craving them). I also freeze about 20-40 dozen roasted jalapenos per year, split in half and de-seeded, packing 2 dozen into each zip-lock bag. When we want jalapeno poppers, I thaw out a bag and make some. It is amazing how many different ways you can use jalapenos. And, that's just jalapenos......there are many equally inventive ways to use poblanos, Anaheims, and all types of chilis. I grow serrano peppers to give salsa an extra kick. If I want Annie's Salsa that is hotter than the basic recipe with jalapenos, I just substitute serranos for part of the jalapenos in the recipe. You can do the same thing with a little bit of habanero, but too much of it makes a salsa that no one can eat. When I make a hotter than average batch, I add stars to the label to indicate it is hotter---one, two, three or four stars depending on how much extra heat.

Most spice peppers can be dried and ground into a powder or cut up into slices in the food processor and then dried in the oven to give you your own hot pepper flakes (like the dried red peppers you shake onto your pizza at pizza places). Most hot peppers can be fermented into a great pepper sauce. I like to grow my own Tabasco peppers and make our own Tabasco sauce. You can make vinegars flavored with peppers. The list is endless. Sweet bell peppers can be used in a billion different ways when cooking. On top of that, the plants are gorgeous.

If you leave a few dried-up peppers on the plants in August or September and let those peppers fall to the ground (and leave them there) during garden clean-up, you'll get volunteers the next year. I have had volunteer peppers every year since around 2004 or 2005. I always transplant them to areas that have "holes" to fill, as most of the time time, the volunteers start sprouting around the time I'm putting my own pepper plants in the ground, so the volunteers aren't exactly planned for---but I find a way to use them anyhow.

The pepper family is huge and there is a pepper for every purpose. You can do so many things with them that it is mind-boggling.

After decades of growing peppers, I haven't gotten tired of them yet, and the more we grow, the more I push myself to find different ways to use them in cooking and to find even more ways to preserve them.

Two key points: (1) when cooking with hot peppers, always wear gloves. A little pepper juice on your hands may not bother you (though I find habanero juice burns my skin immediately) but it will burn the heck out of your eyes(or your children's eyes) if you touch them, and the juice absorbs into your skin and is not easily removed by washing. You have to let it wear off and that can take a few hours. I use disposable blue nitrile gloves that I buy on the first aid/medical aisle at Wal-Mart .(2) when you grow similar peppers that look alike but come both in hot and sweet versions, like Hot Banana Peppers and Sweet Banana Peppers, take great care to keep them separate at harvesting. I usually use masking tape to label each bowl while picking. The importance of this lesson was driven home when I was growing both a standard habanero pepper and a low-heat one. I picked up one and popped it in my mouth, thinking it was the low-heat one, and it was the regular one. That's not a mistake I've ever made since then. : )

Peppers are fascinating. I love them so much that I even grow ornamental ones. The ornamental ones are also edible but tend to produce such hot peppers that most people won't eat them. They do, however, make a great pepper-flavored vinegar or pepper sauce.

Is everyone else thinking the same?

bookmark

Now, I know lots of folks would really love to take a stroll through your garden or they'd like to have pictures. Not me.

I'd much prefer a video zoomed in on your hands at the kitchen counter when you're processing all these! Do you process so fast they become invisible? I bet they're invisible. Wait. I bet YOU are invisible during those times.

Dawn, you have so much 'energy' the binary code from whence this nifty forum appears is stifled and chokes getting through.

101010101 ... **cough** ... 110100 .....

Heck, I bet the cable company has unwittingly replaced a number of lines for the sake of your gardening, harvesting and teaching binary posts.

I know it's funny, but here's the deal: You've so much energy, I have - at this very moment - a delicious jar of habanero jelly as well as multiple jars of excellent zesty sweet pickles, as do many others!

I could totally deal with an exhaustive supply of paprika peppers. I've never had nor used fresh paprika powder in my cooking. My mouth is watering over that potential, right now.

Bon, When autumn rolls around, if you don't want to harvest all the peppers off your plants when the first freeze arrives (or just don't have time), just pull them up and hang the plants upside down indoors somewhere that will not drop below freezing. The peppers will hold on the plant at least a month, and slowly color up, even though the plant isn't growing and isn't (obviously) being watered. You can harvest them and use as needed, or if you can hang the plants in a low-humidity area with good air circulation, sometimes the peppers will dry properly there on the plant. (Sometimes they won't.) That helps prolong the harvest of fresh peppers.

Or, if you want a quicker harvest next year, prune back the plant hard, and dig it up and pot it up in a container of soil. Keep it above freezing and it will sit sort of semi-dormant waiting for better weather to return. You'd be surprised how many people overwinter dormant pepper plants in a basement or spare (but unheated) room, or semi-dormant ones in an unheated greenhouse that generally stays at least above freezing. When you do that, you have bigger root systems and get much faster regrowth and fruiting after the plants are put back into the ground in the spring.

I keep telling Tim I am getting too old and too tired to do all this food preservation, and that I want to cut back, but then I don't do it. My friend, Joyce, always tells me "you work too hard" and I laugh and tell her that I don't, but she is right, I do work too hard. If you love what you're doing though, then it really isn't work. Right?

When we are eating food we grew ourselves, we know exactly what is and isn't in it. That really keeps me going strong on the gardening and food preservation front. For example, some tomatoes grown in some other countries and imported into this country are grown using chemicals banned here.....chlordane, for example. When we grow and preserve our own, I know we're eating fresh tomatoes, dried tomatoes, salsa, pasta sauce, pizza sauce, tomato soup, etc. that was not made from anything raised with chlordane. To me, that's the reasoning behind raising as much of our own food as possible. I want to know exactly what we are eating.

I am grateful we don't live in the 1880s or 1890s or earlier where the woman "had to" do all the household chores and churn the butter and bake the bread daily, and make the soap, etc. I'm too lazy to ever possibly have lived in those times. What I do now is a mere pittance of work compared to what my grandmothers and their mothers before them had to do. We truly have an easy life compared to theirs.

Dawn

Wow. That sounds excellent. I have a perfect spot for a potted pepper plant and also for drying indoors. Overwintering would allow me to concentrate on a potential bumper crop and stock up on goods like the paprika powder. I wouldn't need to use up my limited space for one or two crops.

I recently read that California has been testing and preparing to treat the fracking waste water to be reused on agriculture crops. Yikes!

HeeHee, I remember that year that Okie Tim went to Pennsylvania and left you with all of those peppers. The heat from the peppers was not the only hot stuff coming out of that southern kitchen. LOL

I do make pepper jellies and jams, but I mostly take the easy way out and freeze everything I can use for cooking. I cut some in small pieces to use for sauces, meatloaf, and dishes like that. Late fall when I have a lot of different colors, I cut them in strips and fill gallon freezer bags for things like fajitas. I just fill the bag and when I need some, I just hit it on the counter top and take out what I need. Then I do bags that include both sweets and hots and just label them "spicy" to use for dishes that need a little more heat.

I have canned a few but we didn't eat them very well, but after Dawn gave Al a few jars of 'cowboy candy' last year, I am probably stuck with adding those to my list. LOL