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<\/a><\/p>\nGenerally, wilted peppers are a sign of fungal disease.\u00a0 But since my peppers started out as lush plants, I suspected excessive nitrogen.\u00a0 The raised bed was layers of manure and mulched leaf debris and it only sat for about 4 months before planting.\u00a0 Which might not have been enough time for everything to break down and balance out.\u00a0 At least I hoped it was a nitrogen problem.\u00a0 The excessive nitrogen will fix itself over time.\u00a0 The fungus will require\u00a0crop rotations or new soil.\u00a0 Of course, this\u00a0was going on, too.<\/p>\n
Vegetable deformities are usually blamed on pollination problems, but why would so many blossoms be pollinated improperly?\u00a0 Perhaps the excess nitrogen caused leaf development at the expense of proper blossom formation.\u00a0 Perhaps I planted the peppers too close together and there wasn’t enough air circulation\u00a0or access for pollination.\u00a0 Perhaps the bell peppers hated the summer of 2015.\u00a0 Because even though they were prolific on the plants that didn’t have wilt, they were also really small.<\/p>\n At first I waited patiently for the smaller peppers to grow, hoping they just needed more time.\u00a0 More time just resulted in wrinkled, soft, and<\/em> small bell peppers.<\/p>\n All of these problems made me glad that I planted a new variety of long green\u00a0peppers.\u00a0 They did fine in the raised bed and were just as delicious as green bell peppers.\u00a0 Not as suitable for stuffed peppers but great for snacking or slicing.\u00a0 I’ll definitely be raising them again next year.<\/p>\n Actually, all of the long varieties of peppers did fine.\u00a0 Including the banana peppers and all the hot peppers.\u00a0 There was no reasonable explanation as to why the long peppers weren’t affected by excess nitrogen, fungal wilt, or pollination problems.\u00a0 After all, they shared the same raised bed.\u00a0 They were only inches away from the struggling and wilted bell peppers.\u00a0 There are no rules in the garden, people.\u00a0 No rules at all.<\/p>\n But the hot peppers had problems of their own.\u00a0 The most obvious\u00a0problem was that I labeled them all as “hot” on their garden stakes.\u00a0 That’s it.\u00a0 No variety names, just “hot”.\u00a0 I\u00a0figured they would be easy to recognize once they were\u00a0ripe.\u00a0\u00a0Only\u00a0the Poblanos were happy to oblige.\u00a0 They were beautiful, glossy, distinctively shaped\u00a0peppers.<\/p>\n Of course, Poblano peppers can be left on the plant to age to a red color and then dried.\u00a0 At that point\u00a0a Poblano becomes an “Ancho”, but the wide shape is still recognizable.\u00a0 In either form the pepper is mild, ranging between 1,000 and 1,500 Scoville heat units.<\/p>\n The other varieties of hot peppers were trickier. I finally decided that these were Jalapenos.<\/p>\n Jalapeno was my first guess because that’s exactly what they looked like to me.\u00a0 But when we tasted them we found out that the green\u00a0ones were hardly spicy at all and the red\u00a0ones were very spicy.\u00a0 Turns out that Jalapenos can run from 2,500 – 8,000 Scoville heat units, with the riper red ones being much closer\u00a0to 8,000.\u00a0 Most people are familiar with the heat of a green Jalapeno but to get an idea of the heat difference between green and red Jalapenos,\u00a0Sriracha sauce is made with red Jalapenos.\u00a0 Also, “Chipotle” peppers are dried red Jalapenos.\u00a0 So Chipotle sauces and products are hotter than\u00a0green Jalapenos, although the smoking during the drying process accounts for the smoky intense flavor that tempers the heat a bit.<\/p>\n To add to the heat confusion of Jalapenos, some people told me the striations on the peppers meant more heat.<\/p>\n Those striations are actually called “corking” and the jury is still out on whether that signals a hotter pepper or not.\u00a0 Officially, the marks are just a sign that the pepper grew faster than the skin, essentially leaving stretch marks (a self-explanatory process for all mothers out there).\u00a0 Peppers with corking are usually the older, more mature peppers on the plant so that may account for anecdotal evidence that they are hotter than other peppers.\u00a0 But no one really knows if corking is relevant and I couldn’t get enough kids willing to bite into red Jalapenos to run a taste test at home.<\/p>\n The biggest problem was with these guys.<\/p>\n In the process of picking produce one afternoon, I tossed all the long peppers into the bottom of the wheelbarrow.\u00a0 I mistakenly thought the long yellow, orange, and red ones were just banana peppers or the Lunchbox Snack Peppers<\/a> I got from Johnny’s seeds.\u00a0 Until I sliced them to put in a salad and discovered some of them were the hottest peppers we had in the garden. Not all banana peppers or snacking peppers.\u00a0 Not.<\/p>\n I went back down to the garden to check the stakes hidden under the leafy branches and discovered one of the plants next to the banana peppers was labeled “hot”.\u00a0 Even though it looked like it had banana peppers on it.<\/p>\n There were only 2 choices for banana pepper look-alikes—-either Anaheim or Hungarian Wax Peppers.\u00a0 Since Anaheim peppers are mild I knew it had to be the Hungarian Wax Peppers with a range between 5,000 – 10,000 Scoville heat units.\u00a0 But then the garden really threw out the rules.\u00a0 Because the orange or red Hungarian Wax Peppers that we harvested were more mild than the bright green ones.\u00a0 Which can’t happen.\u00a0 Can’t.\u00a0 Because, as I mentioned earlier, the riper and more mature peppers should be hottest.\u00a0 Capsaicin is the component in peppers that makes them taste hot and the amount of capsaicin in a pepper increases as it ages.\u00a0 The largest amount of capsaicin is found in the white pithy part of the pepper that hold the seeds.\u00a0 But my red and orange Hungarians Wax peppers were far more mild than the yellow ones.\u00a0 Even when I held the plants far apart while picking to make sure I wasn’t putting snack peppers in the mix. Weird.<\/p>\n While I was researching the amount of capsaicin in peppers I discovered that the hot peppers might have been flourishing next to the wilted bell peppers because the increased capsaicin in spicier peppers also acts as an anti-fungal<\/a>.\u00a0 That was bad news in support of fungus killing off the mild bell peppers in the raised bed.\u00a0 But it didn’t explain why the long green bell peppers were doing fine, even though they weren’t spicy.<\/p>\n Sometimes there are no answers.\u00a0 But there are still solutions.\u00a0 I made myself a handy guide to keep everything straight, took a picture, and loaded it onto the computer for future reference.<\/p>\n Then we roasted a bunch of peppers over the stove.<\/p>\n And made a nice pizza with homemade marinara and roasted peppers from the garden.<\/p>\n Oh, yeah, plus some venison sausage on top, too.\u00a0 Because peppers aren’t the only thing in season around here.<\/p>\n The first buck of the season goes to Pretty.\u00a0 Time to get out the pressure canner.\u00a0 Looks like we’ll be stocking the pantry with plenty of canned venison and canned roasted peppers this year.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n