Jalapeno peppers from my garden today!
 

I know it is still winter in most parts of the northern hemisphere but here in Texas we get a mild one. I am going to till my vegetable garden tomorrow and put in my vegies but first I had to pick the jalapeno peppers that have matured over the winter. The pepper plant is about 6 years old and the trunk or stalk is about 1.5 inches in diameter now. It freezes back a little on the really cold mornigs here but it comes back every year.

I weighed these and they total out at 2 lbs 10 ounces and are a mix of red and green ones with the biggest being about 3 inches in length. I put them in an oven broiler tray for the photo and stuck my hand in for a sense of size.

Beautiful!
I hope I will be able to do some vegetable gardening this summer. I don't expect that any nightshade family members I plant will weather the winter, though...

Thanks for the inspiration!

Smoke some of those bad boys! :yum:

Absolutely.:fumette:

Quit bogartin' the peppers.

Actually I have a few grilling recipes for them. I like to buy some small shrimp, remove the shells and clean and do a light chop on them. I mix them with some grated jack cheese or sometime goat cheese and stuff the end of the already cleaned pepper. You can wrap with a slice of bacon as well and put them on a moderate hot grill. Damn good! I've also substituted some tender pulled pork and chedder for a filling!

Very interesting. I grow mine in pots every year and then just trash them, buy seedlings the next year and start over. I never considered that the plant would come back with new growth each year. Do you fertilize specially? Anything you could suggest I would be interested. We are in growing region 9 here on the coast. Thanks.

"I use Miracle Gro", can I get some kind of kick back from them for saying that here?

Actually I do use that and also a Texas product called Medina Hasta Grow which is an organic soil additive. And then there is that water i haul from the cooling ponds at the South Texas Nuclear Project... Just kidding!

I don't know how Savanah rates compared to Houston. We get a mild winter with some frosty mornings but only a really hard spell of freezing weather every decade or so. Most nights if it's going to be frosty I throw a sheet over the plant, one year I strung it with Christmas lights and covered it when it was going into the 20's. I trim it back a bit in the spring but it just keeps taking off. I would imagine that in a year I get about 20 lbs of peppers off of that one plant. I think the plant cost me a dollar so when I bought it. Peppers generally have woody stalks so I guess other kinds could keep being cultivated each year. They are fairly disease and insect free plants.

My wife has some employees from Pakistan as well as China who like them so she takes them to work for them and the other Texans who like hot food.

Thanks. I love to grow them. I grow them and a number of other varieties of hot peppers every year. I will have to try this.

Sweet. We have a Chile de Arbol that is at the moment sufferin' pretty bad after a prolonged spell of Santa Ana winds (hot, dry, out of the northeast, named for a canyon they locally seem to blow right out of). We've brought it back from a pounding before when we thought we'd killed it, so we'll see if this happens again.

My mouth is watering at the very thought of those jalapenos, especially the serving suggestion. Well done you.

Good luck with yours UG.

Thanx on behalf of my poor suffering pepper plant. It's getting Miracle-Gro and I'm trying not to overdo the watering. An established pepper plant is hardier than you might expect, but a prolonged Santa Ana condition like the latest one is tough on anything not an evergreen.

As PRIVATE Benjamin Buford "Bubba" Blue might say...You can barbecue with it, smoke it, broil it, bake it, and saute it. There's jalapeno kebabs, jalapeno Creole, jalapeno gumbo. Pan-fried, deep-fried, stir-fried. There's jalapeno sauce, powdered jalapeno, roasted jalapeno, jalapeno soup, jalapeno stew, jalapeno salad, jalapeno sandwiches, jalapeno and potatoes, jalapeno and shrimp ..." And on and on.

Thanks for sharing!

That is a very good harvest. You seem to have a very nice mix and will bet they will be nice and hot.

For a thought of cooking have you thought of stuffing them?

Good job Chris.

Speaking of hot peppers.