Two New Peppers for Our Garden

My friend Karen surprised me last week with a gift. “I hope you haven’t planted all the spaces in your garden yet,” she said. I had to laugh because at that particular moment, absolutely NONE of my seedlings had found their way to the garden. Karen and I share a love of hot peppers. She presented me with two varieties I had not tried: Ghost and Lemon Pepper.

What Karen and I both love about certain hot peppers is that it only takes a couple to season a whole batch of chili or, in Karen’s case, salsa. Karen cans many quarts of salsa that she adapts as needed to the desired level of hotness.

We both also admire how attractive some hot peppers are. Habaneros for instance are every bit as attractive as the purely ornamental “Chinese Lantern.”

A few years back, Karen clued me into the Purira pepper. That summer our garden greenery was profusely dotted with bright spots of red, orange, and yellow, and our salsa was, well, a little hotter.

I’m looking forward to seeing what these gift plants bring to the garden.

Ghost, also known as the Bhut Jolokia, is a wickedly hot pepper, at one time the Guinness Book Record holder for hottest pepper (2007), although it turns out that “World’s Hottest Chili” is a controversial issue. Among its alleged non-culinary uses is as an ingredient in smoke bombs to keep wild elephants at bay.

Karen’s other gift was Lemon Drop pepper which hails from Peru. It is a vine like plant whose fruits are bright yellow when ripe.

“Where ever did you find these oddities?” I asked her.

“The Ann Arbor Farmers’ Market, of course!” was her reply– which is a reminder to explore with renewed curiosity what might have become a familiar spot to discover hidden treasures and find new plants to try.