Growing and Drying Hot Peppers

Well I came back from shopping in town today and decided to stop at the store and grab a coffee before I went home and put it all away. It's cool enough now that I can get away with that. We don't have a coffee shop here in town so the next best thing is to buy a to go coffee from our general store and sit outside on the bench and see who comes by to visit with. First I visited with one of our local yocals who was already there, coffee-ing and keno-ing. I learned a lot about Keno from someone who sounded to me a seasoned veteran of the sport. After wishing each other well and parting waves, I decided to try my hand and went inside to purchase my ticket. I paid $5 for 5 chances at guessing 3 numbers out of 20 drawn for 5 draws. Sounded easy enough to me. I was sure I could do it. WRONG! After winning $2 on the first go around, I reinvested my "jackpot". Still hopeful...... Oh well, I guess Keno's not my thing. Maybe I'll try it again another day. Or maybe the powers that be decided that my having a Type A personality and enough problems already to deal with, they were doing me a favour by not letting me win and getting hooked up. I mean, I swear I was even addicted to Q-tips at one time. But that's another story. Along came somebody else I knew (in this town it doesn't take long to know practically everybody - gotta love it - unless you're into anonymity I guess ). After the usual how are you doings and the talk about the weather and the coming winter, she mentioned to me that she had just pulled in about 25 pounds of paprika peppers from her garden and wasn't sure what to do with them all. Now I hate to blow my own horn(lies,Ha Ha), but I have established a pretty good reputation in this community for my "green thumb" and my knowledge about utilizing the produce I grow and wildcraft. Truth is the subject facinates me, I have a passion for it and am always looking to learn more about it. I shared with her what I do with hot peppers, haggled with a price on what she'd sell me a couple of pounds for and then followed her out to her place to purchase them. After weighing them out we took the proverbial walk and talk around her gardens and I headed home with my new found treasure. Better than Keno any day. Now I have enough paprika to dry for  this next year's use, and seeds(which I will harvest from the dried peppers in Spring) to grow my own plants for years to come. No more who knows where, under who knows what conditions,grown to sit for who knows how long on a store shelf paprika for me. One more thing I can cross off the weekly 50km round trip grocery list. After putting the groceries away and saying hello to my cats(Tully and Nina J) I gave the kitchen sink a good scrub and the peppers a cool bath. I laid them out on the counter on a clean towel to dry while I went outside to feed my rabbit(BunBun) and back inside to light myself a fire. It's been pretty cool the last couple of nights and some areas of town have already been seeing frost. Talk this year seems to be of early, hard winter. One day at a time..... I went and found my sewing needles and selected one that was thin and had a big enough eye to accomodate some fishing line. You don't want a needle that's too big as it will split the stem of the pepper. The thinner the better. As long as you can thread the eye. I like to use fishing line because it is strong and doesn't break easily. It's very frustrating to thread a string of peppers, go to hang them up and have the line break from the weight and have to start all over again. Been there, done that. Sucks. Have better things to do with my time than to do everything twice. I don't  usually make my strings more than about 4 feet long(which is about 2 pounds of small hot peppers) so if you use about 10 pound test on your fishing line that is plenty strong enough. Keep in mind, the heavier the test, the thicker the line. I find that if you make your strings longer than 4 or 5 feet there is more of a problem with your line tangling and they are bulkier and harder to handle. It's not necessary to use really good quality line for this. The cheaper stuff works just fine. It's also a good idea to keep your stuff organized so you know where things are when you need to use them. Unfortunately I still have work to do in this area as I couldn't find my tackle box, let alone the fishing line that was inside it. I really have to get that shed of mine sorted out before the weather starts to get too bad. It was dark by this time and I don't have power out there to dig around so it seemed the perfect excuse to me to go over to a friend's place, borrow some from her, and drink tea and visit while I strung up my peppers. What a wonderful plan. She had purchased a new herb book in one of the thrift stores on her travels out of town since I had seen her last and it made for some pretty lively discussion as to the new merits of the cur-sed "Napweed" that this book opened our eyes to. As we chatted away I began by threading my needle with some of her fishing line. At one time I used to cut off a length of line but soon discovered that more often than not I would have either selected too long of a piece which to me was wasteful or worse yet too short to accomodate all my peppers. Now I unroll a length of line and then let the spool sit on the ground on my left side as I am right handed and find it easier that way. I thread my needle on to the free end and pull it through the eye about 12 to 18 inches so that it doesn't slip back out while I'm working with it. I take a pepper and push the threaded needle through the middle of the thickest part of the stem near its base where it is attached to the flesh. When I harvest hot peppers for drying, I use a small pair of snips and cut them from the plant leaving about a one inch piece of stem attached. I find that it makes them easier to work with. After I get them all threaded, I remove the needle from the end of the line and  I carefully(to avoid tangles), adjust how they are placed so that I have about a one foot piece of line from the last threaded pepper to the what was once a needled end. I cut the other end  leaving about the same distance of bare line and then I bring both ends up so that they are parallel to each other and loop them into a knot. I now have a round threaded string of brightly, coloured peppers just like a large, beaded necklace. Normally I am at home when I do this so I take them into a warm, dry area to hang them for the winter. For me that is my spare room. I have hooks hanging from the ceiling for this purpose that I leave up all year. I take my loop of threaded peppers and just hang them on a hook and leave them to thoroughly dry. I usually leave them until it's time for me to start planting my bedding pepper plants for spring. Pepper plants don't like to deal with the cold so I don't usually plant them outside here until after the third week in May and sometimes not until the first week in June when I'm sure that all danger of frost is past. I like them to get a good 8 week head-start indoors as our season here is not as long as I would like. I usually take my dried peppers down and plant seeds around the end of March or the beginning of April. I usually leave my dried peppers whole, stored in one gallon glass jars, and only crush up a small amount at a time with a mortar and pestle as I need them to help preserve all their volatile oils. In my opinion the taste is far superior to anything that you can buy at the store and I believe that it is important for us as a society to try to find our way back to living with the seasons and reconnecting to the production of the foods that we consume. But that is a story for another day. Growing and drying your own hot peppers like cayenne and paprika are easy and can be done even by people who have limited growing areas. One or two plants will produce enough peppers for the average person's use and will grow readily in containers in an area as small as an apartment balcony. They are easily started from seed. Their foliage is bright green and they produce small, white, delicate flowers followed by brilliant red fruit. Brightest Blessings and Happy Gardening!