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Making pepper powder

It’s winter and finally snowing. We’re still months away from seed starting season, but the onslaught of seed catalogs has all us gardeners dreaming of spring. Maybe I can’t get anything done outside, but I finally got around to making pepper powders from the peppers I dehydrated during last year’s garden season.

I grow pretty much all my peppers in grow bags and containers. They seem to just do better that way vs. in-ground. And 2022 was a good year for peppers! I lost count of the number of times I sat down to lunch in front of a fresh bowl of blistered shishitos. I’ve got over a gallon of hot peppers that have been fermenting since September. Future hot sauce!

But I had more peppers coming in than even the ferments could accommodate, so I deseeded and dehydrated them. Threw them in bags with desiccant packages to deal with later.

So here we are with smallish bags of dehydrated cayenne, jalapenos, red bell peppers, and one of miscellaneous super hots. I’ve got a little spice grinder I use for garlic powder, though now that I did this with it, it’s probably going to become my dedicated pepper grinder. I use a wire mesh strainer to sift out the chunks the grinder doesn’t get, dumping the chunks back in with the next batch.

Not all the chunks are ground up fine enough by the end of this, and I threw those bits in the freezer. We’ve started doing hot pot at home, and dropping those in will add a lot of flavor to the bone broth.

As I mention in the video, I’m eager to try the jalapeno powder on popcorn, but in the meantime it’s made a really nice seasoning on various foods. And the paprika is out of this world. I wasn’t going to grow bell peppers again this year, but I think I might just to make paprika.

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Slugtoberfest: beer traps for slugs

It’s getting to be mid-October here in zone 5b, and where our first average frost date is October 1, the garden is winding down. But the nice weather we’ve been having and the fact that there hasn’t been a frost yet means that a number of summer garden plants haven’t gotten the memo.

Know who else hasn’t gotten the memo? The slugs. This was a very bad year for slugs (or a very good year, if you are a slug). They went after my sweet peppers and the ground cherries, and there were several loitering around in my cabbage this week.

Even though things are mostly over, it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to get some more beer traps in place and cull the herd a bit. Because slugs and slug eggs overwinter just fine if they’re in a highly insulated environment that doesn’t go below freezing. Once I prep the beds for winter, that’s exactly what I’ll be creating for the benefit of the worms. So I’m officially declaring Slugtoberfest!

Day 1: Setting the Traps

Day 2: First Tally

In the morning, I went out to check the traps, and each has 6-12 slugs in it. That adds up, but it’s not as many as I expected. And they were all little ones. I know for a fact that there are really big slugs out there. Hoping for better on day 3.

Unfortunately, there were also a total of 5 dead wasps in the traps. Less unfortunate, were the pill bugs, an earwig or two, and one mosquito also taking beer bath dirt naps. I would have nothing against pill bugs and earwigs, except it’s rumored that they take out seedlings and I did have a lot of trouble with that this year, especially the okra seedlings in my in-ground bed.

Day 3

As of noon on day 3, all traps have at least a few slugs in them. The single trap in the side garden bed had 2 big guys in there, too.

I know I could put down Sluggo or some other slug poison, but I got through the entire year without using any pesticides and I’m not going to start now. Besides, Slugtoberfest is more fun to say than, “I put down slug poison.” Next year I’ll be trying copper strips and see how those work to deter the slugs, but if they’re already in the bed, I don’t see it helping much. I’ll probably just start using beer traps more often, because they work, and they don’t do much harm to other more beneficial garden critters.