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I've noticed over the last year that every single package sent to me in the last year with chili powders or dried chilies has been opened. Every single parcel with dried peppers has been cut open along one of the outer seams, and then sealed shut with transparent 2" carton sealing tape. The...

Hi there:   My good friend Stanley Okyere in Kumasi sent me some more locally collected seeds from Ghana.  This is the result of an an experiment I'm trying, where I'm looking into different ways of collecting seed varieties that wouldn't be accessible to the outside world. Stanley got seed...

Hi there,   It's harvest season again, and that means separating seeds from pods. Now, the first couple years of doing this, I spent weeks separating the seeds out from the pods with a knife and a pair of tweezers. It was tedious, but I got great results. With the number of pods I have to...

I went to the Republic of Suriname a couple weeks ago, and here are a few of the peppers that I found. Suriname is not far from where C. chinense was originally domesticated. It's the smallest country in South America, but over 22 separate languages are spoken there. With its proximity to the...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Hi there, I've been thinking about pepper diversity lately. It wasn't that long ago that bhut jolokias, fataliis, and Trinidad 7 pots were introduced to the global chilihead community. Now, they each come in every color: red, yellow, mustard, cappuccino, chocolate brown, white, black, etc --...

I just got finished with labelling and shipping a little over 100 seed packets to about 20 people. Now, the numbers aren't huge, but it was still a substantial amount of detail-oriented work, and it seems to be the kind that could be helped with some software. I could easily see software...

Hi there, A lot of folks here have shown interest in growing the pepper seeds I collected in Ghana in August of 2011. Now, that the first crop is starting to ripen, I realized I made a bit of an oversight: I forgot to share the pictures! If you're growing these seeds, here's a snapshot of what...

Are there any big ones? For all the other domesticated species, I can think of at least a few stuffable varieties... except this one. What am I missing?

I just got back from Panama, and I wanted to share some of the pepper varieties I found. We spent a fair amount of time in the autonomous region of Kuna Yala, home of the Kuna people. The Kuna people grow 53 varieties of peppers, which they list in their traditional chant “Kapur...

Any experience with these? Allegedly, they range from mild to hot, depending. Is it just a lot of genetic diversity within the population, or is it just unusually susceptible to growing conditions? How do they otherwise taste? (the number of Indigenous American varieties in my garden is lower...

Hi there, Does any body know of a resource for finding pepper varieties from Mexico by state? There are a lot of varieties out there associated with Yucatan and Oaxaca , but when I look for Chiapas, I get nothing. There must be this information out there. Any advice?

Hi there, In fighting to keep pH values in a nice stable range, has anybody here used polymers with acid functionalities to maintain a stable pH? I started looking around, and I see some commercialized cross-linked polystyrene sulfonate out there, but polyacrylate and polymethacrylate-based...

Hi there, Now that I'm hunkered down for the Winter with my mother plants established, it's time to look into "best practices" for proper pollination isolation techniques. I hope next year to start producing my own seeds, and I want to make sure I keep my strains pure. Since space is at a...

As a function of mass, seeds are easily the most value-concentrated stage of a plant's life; you can always clone afterwards, but each seed represents a unique genome for a particular breeding; the more that are successfully carried over to the next generation, the better preserved that strain...

Hey there, There are a lot of folks giving advice on prevention cross-pollination/outcrossing to maintain the integrity of seed strains, but does anybody know of actual peer-reviewed studies on the topic?