This certainly hasn’t been the best year for our various peppers. But also not the worst, either. Our jalapenos certainly did the best, pulling in around two pounds across our ten plants.
While we don’t really get massive pepper plants in the north, we do make up for it in plant quantity for those plants that really matter to us.
We really didn’t see much in the way of full ripening across our jalapenos, at least compared to most summer seasons. Our cooler than average month of July certainly contributed to that, as did some of our early aphid problems. But, this is why we go hard on jalapenos. Whether they fully mature, or not, means we win either way.
For pretty much all of our peppers, they are destined for the freezer. We slice our peppers up, put them into freezer bags and freeze them. You certainly can blanch peppers, and this will help them last a bit better, but we’ve found peppers to be quite resilient to freezing compared to a lot of veggies. We often aren’t particularly concerned about the texture of our peppers, since they’re often further diced and are rarely “the star of the show” in any given dish. We really just use them for heat a bit of flavor.
We do also reserve a bit of our jalapenos for a batch of Cowboy Candy, when our canned stocks get a bit low. We’ll talk about this more in a coming post, since we’re prepping a batch this year.
Peppers are definitely quite frost sensitive, so that’s one of the main things we’re focusing on harvesting out and preserving at this moment. We grow a rather decent sized crop of peppers (over 70 plants), so it takes quite a bit of work to finish it out.
We’ve done some experimentation (which some might call “mistakes,” but heh, we’re the ones judging here) with harvesting peppers after a frost. They hold up surprisingly well, considering the plants are so frost and cold sensitive. But, they aren’t very tolerant of repeated frosts. So, if you accidentally don’t harvest those peppers before a frost, you’ll still be just fine as long as you prioritize them.
As for the rest of our peppers, we harvest, prepare and preserve them in the same way. Some years we’ll do things like pickled peppers with our hot wax peppers. In banger pepper years, we’ll often come up with many ideas since we often have so many to work with. But, this year, we’re just grateful that a lot of our plants produced and so we’re really just trying to service our core pepper needs!
Once we get our peppers done, we generally focus on the rest of our container garden. We want to get to a place where we can shut this down, since we really prefer to do this before it really cools off!
