I had a good year of peppers and have about 5-6 lbs of peppers to eat, dry, process, preserve, enjoy, etc. I may overwinter the Bhut Jolokia, but haven’t decided yet. That would be the only one though, as the rest would take up too much room in the house.

Here is a picture of the harvest all piled up on the table. We have enough yello Aji’s to make about 5 more batches of the Mango salsa. The bulk of the smaller red ones will be dried and ground into chile powder.

This was my first year of gardening, so I didn’t really know what to expect. I love to use poblanos in cooking. I especially love a recipe I have for poblano chicken chowder. So, I purchased 4 plants online. Put them out in April and they grew like mad crazy. By the end of the season, they looked like little trees with brown trunks. Lots and lots of poblanos. Definitely enough that I’ll be able to use them all winter and spring in cooking. I pulled up the plants after the last harvest, since they are in containers and no space for over-wintering.

I also had four jalapeno plants. Although they grew really well and produced really well, I was disappointed in them. They were too mild. No real taste at all. I love jalapenos, though. And, I’ll be trying a different variety next year.

I had one plant with tiny little peppers. It’s a hybrid called Apache. I used just three in a salsa and it was quite hot, so I was a bit scared to use them in cooking. I dried all these peppers and ground them into powder in a pepper-designated coffee grinder. I’ll be making my own version of Tony Chachere’s with the powder. Even bought cute little glass jars for it.

I’m very happy with the pepper gardening this year. But, I hope to do better next year. I definitely plan on including banana peppers since I love pickled pepper rings.