Chinese or Szechuan Pepper Oil Szechuan pepper-infused oil is a tasty and versatile condiment. Use it in marinades for meat, as a dipping sauce or to spice up soups and other dishes. It’s more than just pepper flavored. It has layers of taste from other spices and aromatics. Once you see how flavorful it is,…
Tomatoes and peppers. That’s 90% of why I love gardening. Is there anything to compare to a home-grown tomato? Not even the tomatoes at the farmer’s market are as good as what comes out of my garden. And for unparalleled taste, peppers are a close second. Like tomatoes, the flavor and variety of peppers that…
Safety note: Whenever handling hot peppers, always wear disposable plastic gloves. Always. And wash hands thoroughly with soap and hot water after taking the gloves off. Every year I plant peppers. A lot of peppers. At least six varieties of peppers, two to four plants of each variety. This year it’s Jalapeno and Serrano (for…
It’s every gardener’s nightmare: You spend all summer nurturing your lovely tomato and pepper plants along and when the time comes to pick the delicious fruits of your labor you discover they have ugly, black rotting splotches on the bottom of the fruit. You have fallen victim to the aptly-named Blossom End Rot (or BER).…
Keep your tomatoes warm and happy I’ve written before about protecting tomatoes and peppers from cold weather. I even did an experiment a couple years ago that showed using these tomato protectors gave me bigger plants that produced a whole two weeks ahead of plants that didn’t have protection. I started off using Wall-o-Water. That’s…
Wait! Isn’t nightshade a poison?!? Well, yes. if we were talking “nightshade” the plant, that is a poison. But today, we’re talking “nightshade” the family of plants. And they are probably among your favorite veggies. Vegetables in the nightshade or solanaceous family include: potatoes tomatoes peppers (both sweet and spicy varieties) eggplant tomatillos You can…