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Has anybody here tried supplementing the squirrels' diet with a second generation anticoagulant like bromadiolone? It comes in peanut butter flavor for dispatching recalcitrant rats. It would seem like a practical fix -- especially in an urban environment.

My aji amarillo crop and my freetime finally coincided, and I had the chance to make some Peruvian goodies. The first one is an all-purpose chili paste, one of the cornerstones of Peruvian food: pasta aji amarillo, or yellow pepper paste. First off, the pepper paste: Start with about a pound...

Thank you kindly. I grow about 40 or so varieties per season, and I have about 300 varieties of seeds. From the sound of it, that makes me sort of a mid-level enthusiast. I would love to grow more, but I do the best I can with a short growing season and a very small back yard. There are five...

Well said! Making it more complicated, what about peppers that share the same name, but are clearly different? People whinge about redundancies in collections, and I don't doubt there are examples, but more often than not, the *exact opposite* is the problem. I've done a decent amount of...

Mako akokɔsrade peppers are about half the size, and with a very different flavors -- more melon, less citrus. Here's a picture of the original peppers that I collected (the ruler is showing centimers.)

Sorry -- I've made some space in my inbox now. I wasn't prepared for the response. :)

Hi there, For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, planning for 2013 is well underway. Since I'd still like to see as many people growing these as possible, I am re-offering these seeds (here's a link to the original "Treasures from Ghana" discussion.) Here's the deal: one SASBE will get...

Does anybody have electronic access to this? If so, would anybody be kind enough to share a pdf copy with me? Here's the link: http://dx.doi.org/10...1-4419-7299-6_8 Here's the tantalizing bibliographic information: The Biological Activity of Phytochemicals - Recent Advances in...

The ghosts of my murdered vegetables cry out for vengence against Sciurus carolinensis! During the growing seasons, the little buggers uproot my pepper plants. Now in the winter, they uproot my garlic bulbs. I have no sympathy (and I mean NO sympathy) for squirrels, but I also don't have the...

Does anybody have recommendations for seedlings? I has some issues last spring with aphids. Neem oil/azadirachtin-based products sure do work, but they can be rough on the plants. Any ideas for the young ones?

My sincere condolences -- rainy, cold, soggy weather is great for growing a lot of vegetables, but peppers aren't one of them. I've read quite a bit about capsaicin production being promoted by underwatering during the ripening process (a.k.a. "hydric stress") -- that little phenomenon has been...

Do you have non-anecdotal evidence for this? I grow indoors for much of the year, and my plants get regular tap water. I have had no problems producing pods full of plenty of capsaicin. I don't think the water is the issue.

I didn't get a lot of rocotos this year, but I'm eager to put them to use. They're a lot smaller than the ones I'd enjoyed stuffed in Urubamba or Ollantaytambo, so the question is then: how do I make the most of them? I figure you can't go too wrong with a sauce strategy, but what is the best...

You got that about exactly right! I did a little searching, and I found a lot of pepper de-seeding machines, but they are for an entirely different scale of operations (i.e. they are measuring throughput in tons per hour.) Indispensible if you have a large farm, but not quite what I need. I...

Hi there, I've spent an hour or two everyday for the last month going through this year's harvest, de-seeding. I typically can get through about two or three varieties in a day. Basically, this is taking friggin' forever. The smaller varieities (e.g. chile pequin) are the biggest pain in the...

Update: the beechwood sawdust arrived. Sausage stuffing/curing/eating to begin shortly. :)

Beech wood can be found at some lumber yards, yes. But in my neck of the woods, the local lumber yard only sells beech wood as a surface laminate on different composite products. Beech wood pergo tiles would prolly not be the best material for smoking meats.;) I did search around a few town...

Does anybody remember what this variety was properly called? I have peppers which I've been calling "Royal Instructor" now for the last six months, but I was hoping for more of a backstory on them.

Thanks for the advice. I called a relative back in the Old Country with a few extra decades of experience, and I told him step-by-step what I did to make Mettwurst. There was no mercy in the criticism. and there was nothing left without comment -- not the choice of temperature, not the duration...

Hey there, My brother and I are just getting into DIY sausage making, and we're trying to do Mettwurst -- a sausage popular in Germany and the Benelux (ma's family is Luxembourgisch.) So, we made our first batch here in the US of A, smoking it for 24 hours @ 100 F with a little black walnut. The...