Roasted Cayenne is the bomb.

Black Hungarian Peppers are okay roasted. They're better gently roasted and added to my chicken taquitos in lieu of diced green peppers. Not sure I'll grow these again. Would rather have the Anaheim next year.

I still have not grown Jimmy Nardello but it is on next years seed list. I think I am pretty well set with my hot varieties going forward, but am still testing sweets. I grew Black Hungarian before. I wanted to like them, but after 2 growing seasons, I decided I could not waste room in my garden on them. And roasted cayenne "Goat Horn" is the bomb! Or fried. Or fresh. Or dried, or...

Yep. Might not suit your buds in the end, but worth a grow.

Jimmy Nardello doesn't grow well for me. And it was the one that got mealy bugs. I will grow Czechoslovakian Black (mildly hot) because it is beautiful. I'm not a hot pepper person. Had a good tasting bell last night, I think it was California Wonder. But the walls weren't very thick. Is that the growing conditions or the variety?

Amy,

You know. Because of your mealy bug experience, I was able to stymie an attack? I saw a couple of white spots and ripped the leaf right off. No problem after that.

I'm growing my Nardellos in dappled shade. It's not the most prolific, but it's doing well. In fact, all of my peppers are in dappled shade, except one Marconi plant. Curious.

Pepper flavor can vary a lot based on weather conditions. When grown in cooler, wetter conditions, their flavor often is milder or weaker or less robust.

For future reference, remember that in hot, dry weather, hot peppers become hotter, so something like habanero peppers, which already are very hot, can become truly unbearably hot in hot, dry, drought-type weather. Even in jalapenos, the flavor is markedly hotter in drought conditions. Pepper varieties that aren't too hot for me when grown in milder conditions suddenly become so hot that I cannot eat them when the peppers are growing and maturing in hot, dry conditions.

Amy, Thin walls usually are caused by a combination of any or all of the following: extreme heat, poor nutrition and lack of rainfall/irrigation. There also is a genetic component, with some sweet bells having naturally thicker walls than others. If you are growing a variety, like California Wonder, that normally has thick walls and you are getting thin walls, the answer likely lies in your air temperatures, nutrition or moisture.

Peppers rare heavy feeders. They need a lot of nutrition to keep them producing well, and to keep them producing high-quality fruit, throughout the season. They especially need potassium and calcium, and if they run short of these two nutrients, thin walls can result. Pepper plants are one of the few plants that you can pretty much deliberately overfeed them almost to the point of burning them and they'll just eat up all that fertilizer and produce mega-loads of beautiful peppers. If they are not fed regularly throughout our long hot growing season, their production can drop and the pepper walls indeed can become very thin. You also can get thin walls if your soil pH is out of the range peppers need or if you don't water them enough.

Sometimes, even when the peppers are in great soil that is in the right pH, have plentiful nutrition from regular feedings and are in soil kept constantly moist (but not sopping wet), they still produce thin walled peppers because of excessive heat. You cannot control the weather, but if you can shade the plants with shade cloth or even a bedsheet suspended at least 2 feet above the top of the plants (to allow good air flow) during the worst of the summer heat, that will keep the plants cooler and that alone can keep them from producing peppers with such thin walls. Usually thin walls are more of a problem on fruit that ripens in July and August and, often, if heat is the issue, you'll get peppers with thicker walls in the fall after temperatures drop a bit.

It might just be that, for whatever reason, California Wonder isn't happy in your specific area. Other varieties that normally produce peppers will thick walls that you could try instead would be Jupiter, Yolo Wonder or Keystone Giant. Another variety that has produced peppers with really thick walls for me is called Super Heavyweight.

Finally, be sure you are not harvesting your sweet bell peppers too early. If you harvest them too early, you can get thin walls because the fruit has not had time to thicken up. When I want to harvest bell peppers at the green stage, I wait for them to reach their mature size, then I wait a couple more weeks, keeping their soil moist throughout. When I do that, I never get thin walls. A lot of people harvest their green bells as soon as they seem to be the expected mature size, and that often is too soon. At that point, they may be the mature size, but size they just reached that size, they haven't had time to reach their more mature thickness.

I really don't harvest my sweet bells green (in the same way I don't harvest my tomatoes green) because I prefer fully mature peppers, but sometimes in spring, if I have tomatoes piling up everywhere and I want to make salsa, I'll harvest sweet bells green so I can make salsa. Other than that, I always like to let mine turn orange, red or yellow because their flavor at that point is so superior to the flavor of green peppers. I've only had thin walls on fully-colored, fully-mature bell peppers if I failed to keep their soil moist, if the temperatures are blistering hot and I didn't shade them or if the plants exhausted the supply of nutrients available to them and I didn't give them a supplemental feeding to make up for it. The thing about thin walls is that by the time you cut into a pepper and realize you have them, it is too late to fix them....but you can feed the plants to try to ensure the next harvest will have better walls.

*** Jumps up. Runs outside. Throws in magnesium salts and bunny berries. Waters in well. ****

Yes, this plant was out of reach of the hose most of August. I sprayed a jet at it and hoped for the best, but it didn't always get watered well. I now have a longer hose. You know those "as seen on TV" pocket hoses that shrink up when the water pressure goes off? I love them, light weight, less kinking. But, when they go, the fabric slides back, the inside looks like a water balloon and it explodes all over you. Just so you know, LOL. I need to feed my peppers, too. Tomorrow I guess. Going to Bartlesville tonight to celebrate my folks 64th anniversary.

Good to know lol

What do ya'll do with the extra cayenne peppers that do not get dehydrated?

There must be at least 101 ways to use up cayenne (and all other) peppers when you have a good harvest. In addition to dehydrating them to grind into pepper flakes or powder, you can string them on ristras and let them dry naturally. I just make a ristra and hang it on a nail on the wall in my kitchen. One year we had so many pepper ristras hanging everywhere (mostly anaheims and cayennes) that I hung them on a Christmas tree along with western-themed Christmas ornaments and chili pepper lights, and used other smaller ristras to decorate a grapevine wreath for the front door.

You can roast them and then either can or freeze them. You can eat them fresh too, you know. (grin) You can add them to any cooked dish to spice it up. You can use them to make pepper jelly. Some of my favorite pepper jellies are a blend of 6 to 8 different kinds of hot peppers---it makes each batch unique depending on how many peppers of each kind you use. The important thing is that your total amount of peppers not exceed the amount specified in the recipe. When a pepper jelly, for example, says to use 2 lbs. of hot peppers, you can use any kind of hot pepper you choose, including multiple types if you want. I like to blend jalapenos, poblanos, cayennes and serranos in a jelly batch. (Habaneros only go into Habanero Gold because of their strength.)

You can freeze them and thaw them out for winter cooking. You even can freeze them and then thaw them out in winter and use them in fresh salsa, canned salsa or you even can oven-roast them or dehydrate them after you thaw them out. You can use them to make cayenne-flavored vinegar or oil. You can use them in salsa. You can use them to make pepper sauce. I could go on forever. Instead of trying to type a bunch of recipes, I'll link the NCHFP/UC-Davis pages on pepper preservation. It has tons of recipes, and you know when the recipes come from the NCHPF that the recipes are safety-tested and approved, unlike some of the random recipes you find when surfing the internet.

Hope this helps,

Dawn

Preserving Peppers

ty! I'm sorry, I was just outside tending to the bunnies when I saw hordes of red peppers and freaked. I instantly thought it's going to get too wet to dehydrate. Of course I don't know that, but it is a possibility.

I'm having cornbread and your jelly, tonight. :)

The year we had so many I made fermented hot sauce (kind of like tobasco. I don't do hot, but DH does. He used it. He didn't say it was the best he ever had, but he didn't throw it out, LOL. I tried to give them away, but most people won't take them. This year we have a jar of vinegar brine (and garlic) in the fridge where he's pickling the hot peppers. There are recipes for "heat rub" for rubbing on aches and pains. There are several recipes, here is one. Pepper pain relief cream

Tx again. I failed to mention it was raining cats and dogs while I was outside looking at the peppers. Our day temps are not likely to meet the expected range for dehydration, either. Excellent link.

That sounds really delish, scott. Great addition.

Bon, You can use peppers so many ways, so take advantage of having huge loads of them to experiment with different ways to use them and to preserve them. Before I made pepper jelly for the first time back in the 1990s, for example, I never would have thought I'd like pepper jelly. Now I make tons of it almost every year. It is the same with candied jalapenos. I can a lot of them each year and we give away a lot as gifts at Christmas. People love them. Who knew that would happen? I have a nephew who has digestive problems and he no longer can eat regular jalapenos, but the candied ones don't bother is stomach, so I try to give him a case of candied jalapenos every Christmas.

I'm about to have a major canning problem. Tim starts a new job in a new division within the same police agency in two weeks. He'll be leaving the division where he's worked for the last 8 or 10 years, and where a couple hundred people get gift bags of home-canned goods from us every Christmas. It is a well-established tradition we all enjoy---around October the guys at work start trying to trick him into telling them exactly what I canned back in the summer and fall and exactly what will be in the gift bags. He and I prefer to keep it secret----it is the same stuff more or less every year, but one year it might be Jalapeno Jelly and the next year it might be Habanero Gold...or it might be Zesty Bread and Butter Pickles one year and Candied Jalapenos the next. It's almost always Annie's Salsa, unless I've given away too much or canned too little, and then the folks who don't get the salsa are a little disappointed. I think the annual guessing game is a hoot, and it certainly shows how eagerly they await the annual distribution of canned goods from our garden. It does wear me out sometimes, though.

Tim will have a lot of officers working for him/with him in the new division, and he is crazy if he thinks I am going to do enough canning for him to take Christmas gifts to everyone in two divisions. So.....while I enjoy sharing our canned salsa, jellies, jams and peppers with everyone in whatever division he is working in, I am not even (no way, no how) going to double my workload by trying to put together gift bags for two divisions. I think he is in trouble. The folks he's leaving are going to miss their Annie's Salsa, Habanero Gold, Apple Pie Jam and Candied Jalapenos, but I'm not crazy enough to think I can put together 300 bags of canned goodies versus the current 150-200. I think his new work group will be smaller, so I might even be able to cut back on how many tomatoes and peppers I grow and can in future years, once I have a better understanding of how many people are in his soon-to-be new division. I enjoy canning and I enjoy sharing the goodies from our garden, but this whole Christmas thing at work has sort of taken on a life of its own that I cannot escape. I have to have certain "canning quotas" in my mind when planning the garden, planting it, harvesting it and doing all the canning, or I end up running out of certain items (especially Annie's Salsa) at Christmas time.

Now, I just hijacked your pepper thread and I apologize, but while talking about all the ways to preserve peppers, I started thinking about this job change of his and how it will affect my gardening and canning. Because peppers are so prolific, though, they do make great gifts at the holidays---whether you're giving away pepper jelly, salsa, candied jalapenos, pepper flakes in little spice jars or whatever. That's a little more food for thought for you. You also can make pepper jelly or candied peppers and barter them for things with people who don't grow peppers or who don't can them. The possibilities are endless. I have friends to whom I give salsa and Habanero Gold every year, and they give me fresh peaches and apples in the years when they have a plentiful harvests. (They give me tons and tons of them!) I always can and freeze the peaches and apples, and am careful to give back to my friends some of their own apples and peaches made into jams and jellies. It is sort of an endless circle of giving. You can do the same thing with peppers!

Dawn

That is quite a work load. I had your habanero jelly last night, in fact. Meanwhile, my house smells like peppers. I wonder if heaven smells like peppers. I'd like to think so.

Those poor people ya'll are leaving behind. tsk tsk lol Sometimes things happen for a reason. Maybe it's an opportunity for you to cut back or eliminate. That's a ton of work!

And oh. I never mind hijacks.

Dawn, I made Zesty Bread and Butter pickles this year and opened my first jar today (and made 7 more jars). LOL I really did like them, but that's a lot of sugar.

Oops, Bon. I highjacked it too, but to keep it pepper related...Hab Gold is my favorite jam. Al likes a shaker of dried pepper flakes that I make from Frank's Thai Hot that George shared seeds for.

chickencoupe-I think Heaven will smell like fire roasted poblanos!