This is Weed. And this is Wack with WOWDY gardens and we’re an organic gardening show. Focusing on the health benefits and environmental benefits of getting out and digging in the soil. That’s right. Grow your own food. You’d be so much happier. Right. And today we’re celebrating Cinco de Mayo. And the first thing that came to mind for us was growing hot peppers. That’s right. I used to love hot peppers. I had a hot pepper poster and
hot sauce poster up in my man cave. And you know, we used to collect hot sauces. In fact, my neighbor makes his own hot sauce. Right. I make my own hot sauce. I made three different varieties last year with some buddies. A yellow one, a green one and a red one. Wow. That’s cool. And they’re sitting on my dining room table. I made them rather mild. Most of them I took the seeds out. We all got together with the peppers we had grown in our backyard and cooked them down.
took the seeds out and used a lot of bell peppers, yellow bell peppers to go with the yellow hot pepper and so on. What would you cook them with? That’s a good, I’d have to, you know, that was last fall. All I know is when we were cooking them down. In water? Must have been water. Yeah, it was boiling them down, you know, and it was quite strong. But to
it really didn’t come out overpowering because we used a lot of bell peppers, as I say in garlic. And, you know, we experimented, we read. Onions. I’m pretty sure we did onions, but I can’t say positively. I know we did. But you might see me in hot sauce. It’s a delicious hot sauce. And I grew a pepper last year that I discovered by mistake because my mom’s from North Carolina and this pepper has
the word Carolina in it. It’s called the Carolina Reaper. You may have heard of it. Super hot, but it takes a tiny is a pinch of a dried Carolina pepper to give a dish a really, to give a cilantro salsa dish a really nice flavor without being overpowering at all. Of course, if you take a bite out of the thing, you’re going to go to the emergency room or at least fill as if you should go to the emergency room. Yeah. When I grew pepper,
I mainly grew this one little tiny type called plicky new and plicky new means mouse turd in Vietnamese. And it was about the size of a mouse turd. These little tiny peppers say it. Say it would be a size of a jalapeno for Barbie doll. Okay. It was a tiny, tiny pepper, really considered an ornamental pepper. And the things were tiny. I’d say the whole pepper plant stood about eight inches tall. You can grow them on your windows. Yeah, you can. And the each plant will put off about 400.
Peppers. So it’s extremely prolific. And you can have these things on your windows. So then I bring them in and then keep them up all the way up until Christmas where you have some green and red on your windows. So from these tiny peppers is kind of cool. And I did that for a while and we saved the seeds and it would come true from seed every year, which, you know, not all cultivars do tiny, tiny seeds, tiny pepper, the smallest pepper I’d ever seen. And of course you would not cut these open. You would basically just throw one or two
in a dish and then, you know, make sure you don’t eat the thing when you’re eating the dish. Spice it up just fine. You want to take them out. But I do love hot peppers and I don’t overdo it. I can’t eat Thai Thai hot style like I might have been able to as a young person. But one of the highlights of my week this week as far as gardening goes was I had saved some of my Carolina Reaper seeds. These are the coolest little
globe like wrinkly things with a little tail on them, a rather large bush. Anyway, I planted some of the seeds about five days ago. I thought they weren’t going to come up and lo and behold, they’re there. Popping up. Popping up. So and I can’t tell you how happy that makes me to come down and see a seed popping for sure. And not getting it. So if you’re like me and you like Mexican food, you might like spice. It’s not too late.
You need to start your hot peppers in the garden right now or pick some up at your local market. That’s right. We have the orange pepper in our garden design and our hoodies in our shirts. Right. And I, you know, we do grow quite a few orange peppers myself. These are mild peppers and they are heirloom. There’s supposed to be an heirloom type. So we’ll see. They weren’t nearly as prolific as my tomato seedlings. So we’ll see what happens. If you leave the plant standing, the seeds will drop and you’ll have
volunteers the next year. Yes, that’s the theory anyway. So take away from this. Start your, Cinco de Marz, a good day to start your chili peppers. Yeah. Or buy some from the farmers. Or buy some from the farmers market. They’re quite easy to grow. They do need a little bit of space. Most hot peppers put out more fruit than sweet peppers do. Right. Yeah. I always have an abundance of peppers hence making hot sauce. And some of the ones that are
considered ornamental are still hot. They’re just tiny and most people don’t want to use them culinary wise, but you can. Yeah. The hot pepper is a large part of my cooking arsenal. I’m always reaching for my jar of dried peppers from the garden. It’s nice. It’s nice to be able to grab your own spices that you’ve made from your own garden. Yes. So celebrate the holiday and make up a spicy dish. Plant some peppers.
No. This is Wack from Wiredy Gardens. Join us next week and we’ll be back.