tel: 512 280-1192 thursday, september 24, 2015
Nursery notes: ghost and scorpion peppers on sale: $6.99 (reg.
$9.99); Now is the time to spread corn gluten to help prevent
weeds from popping up on your lawn. $5 off every $50 bag. Only
a few weeks left for this treatment. / 50% off hanging baskets of
superfood purslane: $7.50 (reg. $15). / 25% off bougainvilleas:
reg. $10, now $7.50. Lots of chrysanthemums - $7.99 each.
Please drop by to say hello!
Make your own Hypertufa Pots: Make beautiful garden contain-
ers that will last for years with this wonderful hypertufa technique.
Mix together 3 parts perlite, 3 parts moss and 2 parts Portland
cement, and you're on your way. Details here - Martha Stewart.
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Celebrate Fall with hard cider: although the heat index tells us
otherwise, yesterday Fall officially began, and so going along with
this fiction, let's brew some cider. 'Brewing hard cider from non-
alcoholic, or “sweet” cider is a simple process, and the inebriating
end product is as delicious as it is discombobulating,' writes Nathan
Poell in Mother Earth News.
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Central Texas Gardener: Garden Conservancy Tour. Get ideas
for your low-water design, whatever your style. Visit a drought-
tough succulent garden. On Sat., 4 p.m., Sun. at 9 a.m. KLRU
My Quest for the Hottest Pepper
by Chris Winslow
My interest in hot peppers began about 25 years ago. A good friend
from Hondo, TX, well known for his hot sauces and salsas, asked
if I would grow some habanero peppers for him.
He handed me some seeds, and as the plants grew and flourished
and produced an amazingly bountiful crop, I started to understand
just how much fun growing these plants could be. Before long I
was on the road to growing the hottest peppers I could find.
The heat measurement of peppers is referred to in Scoville units.
Measured now with high-performance liquid chromatography,
these units of heat intensity were originally formulated by the
American pharmacist Wilber Scoville to measure the level of pure
capsaicin within hot peppers.
Sweet peppers scored zero on the Scoville scale, while a jalapeño
might score 3,000 Scovilles – meaning it would have to be diluted
3,000 times till no heat was detected. Some of our favorite peppers
score as follows:
In the 1,000 to 3,000 range we have Anaheims (New Mexico chilis)
and poblanos. From 3,000 to 10,000 we have jalapeños. Above
10,000 - serranos, tabascos, cayennes, Thai, and chili pequins.
Then there is a large gap, and we find the orange habaneros scoring
around the 200,000 Scoville units. It was here that I learned of the
chocolate and red Caribbean variety that were easy to grow and
twice as hot as the standard orange.
Then along comes the red and yellow scotch bonnets scoring a
whopping 400,000 Scovilles.
Within the last 4 years a ghost pepper from Bangladesh and India
has found its way to my door. Also called bhut jolokia or naga
pepper, these devils score 1,000,000 on the Scoville scale. Danger-
ous I’d say. Handle with care!
This year an even hotter pepper has come along. Known as the
Trinidad scorpion, it has the sting of 1,400,000 Scovilles.
I thought that was about as hot as you could get until I heard of
Australian hybridizer Butch Taylor. He has produced a Trinidad
Scorpion called the Butch T. This pepper is hitting the 2,000,000
mark on the Scoville scale… and should hold the record for at
least a little while as the hottest pepper on the planet.
I don’t know what’s next but I’m pretty sure a hotter pepper is on
the horizon. I can imagine what they will call it. P.S. My Trinidad
Scorpion Butch T peppers are up and smiling at the sunshine.
Happy hot pepper gardening everyone!
Please contact newsletter editor Darrel Mayers (pictured above)
with any ideas for articles or interesting links:
internationalrain@yahoo.com
(hitting 'reply' to this email won't work)Visit the website: Its About Thyme facebook
Visit the nursery: 11726 Manchaca Road, Austin, 78748
