Since we’re hitting the halfway point of our growing season, let’s revisit some of our peppers. Specifically, the bulk of our northern pepper harvest, jalapenos!
There’s no doubt the generally warmer growing season we’re seeing in the Interior of Alaska is benefitting us this year. When we get these seasons, we’ll practice multiple harvests across our jalapeno plants. If you think about it, most of your peppers to date produced in the last 45 days. A second harvest can also be had in another 45 days.
When you start picking fruit off the pepper plant, it will encourage the plant to flower more. Plants are genetically “programmed” for survival and the seeds in the fruit are the product of that survival instinct. When the plant “senses” it has less fruit, it will shift its efforts back into fruit production as opposed to fruit maturation.
Sure, we could leave our jalapenos on the plant and get them to fully ripen. We love a “proper” red, yellow or orange jalapeno as much as the next person. But, in the north, this is a difficult venture. It’s much harder to mature a fruit in a cooler climate then it is to produce more green fruit. And guess what? Jalapenos are considered “normal” when they’re green!
You can also practice this with peppers like hot wax, shishito, Anaheim, serrano and any other peppers that are “mature in size” and also considered “ripe” when they are green. You can also allow them to mature, or change color, if you’d prefer. (Some may, some will not in cooler temperatures.) Peppers are reasonably field hardy as long as the plant is not stressed, but once the peppers change color it’s time to pick them.
We easily pulled a couple pounds off our 16 jalapeno plants with this initial harvest. We have many more coming in behind these. And dang, we grew some chonkers this season! I swear it’s almost like we’re growing peppers in Louisiana this season. It’s been really, really good!
These are our hands down favorite variety of jalapeno, the La Bomba II F1. They are a delicious and relatively low heat pepper, typically producing between 1,800 to 5,000 Scoville. We used to grow several varieties of jalapeno and now just stick to this one, favoring its prolific production, great flavor and fast production rates.
For this initial harvest, our primary preservation is for frequent winter use. We typically slice up the jalapenos into rings and store them into freezer bags. While we “could” blanch them, we’re less concerned about ideas like “texture” when it comes to peppers. They’re mostly there for heat and flavor, often getting cooked down pretty good in our dishes. Future preservations will be focused on longer term preservation, such as candied jalapenos.
