Spices Don't Get Any Fresher Than This

Each year we plant a couple Criolla Sella Pepper plants in the garden.  I raise them from seed normally, but this year a couple plants came up volunteer from last year so I just transplanted them where I wanted them.  They produce prolifically and keep us busier than Peter Piper harvesting the peppers.

At first they are green .

And then when they are ripe they are bright Jack O'Lantern orange.  That bright color against the green foliage means they are easy to spot when picking.  You can see the small white blooms next to my pinky finger.

I'll pick a bucket and bring them inside, wash them, cut them in half and put them on the food dehydrator trays and let them dry overnight until they break in half easily with  snap.

I use an old potato/carrot peeler blade to insert into the pepper and de-seed them.

Normally I'd throw them into the food processor and pulse until the peppers turned to powder, but I was feeling like doing it the old fashioned way tonight.  I pulled out Tricia's molcajete.  That is the Mexican version of the mortar and pestle.  It works nicely for grinding.

With a little effort the dried peppers are pulverized into ground pepper.  I wish you could smell the 'smoky-hot fragrance' of the freshly ground pepper.  Wonderful!

The bright orange-colored pepper against the white plate makes a stark contrast.  It kind of makes black pepper boring, don't you think?

We funnel it into pepper containers and use all year long.  We'll make batches of fresh ground Criolla Sella peppers as long as the plants produce - that will be until winter.

Sorry McCormick.  Criolla Sella fresh ground pepper beats the pants off of store bought ground black pepper.

Higher Ground

There is an old hymn that you can listen to by clicking here, that we sing at our church, and the chorus goes like this:

Lord, lift me up, and let me stand

By faith on Canaan’s tableland;

A higher plane than I have found,

Lord, plant my feet on higher ground.

It is a hymn, really a prayer, in which the songwriter aspires to grow closer to his Savior and by doing so becoming more Christ-like each day.  Rather than low living, the author of the hymn (and the singer of it) chooses to live on higher ground, walking with Jesus.  It's an inspiring song.  It should be our aim to have our feet planted on higher ground.

Our very wet first four months of the year reinforced the fact that our feet need to be planted on higher ground and our garden needs to be planted on higher ground as well!  Over the years I've amended our garden soil with tons of compost and garden soil, but it still needs to be higher to avoid sickly, yellow-leaved, scalded vegetable plants.  In order to combat this, I ordered a load of topsoil and had it delivered near our garden.  It would have been easier to dump it directly in the garden, but I don't have a wide gate leading into the garden area.  Therefore that caused me and my boys to work considerably in this effort.  We got it done, though, and hard work is good for the body and soul, I think!

A load of topsoil

Each day we loaded up bucketfuls of topsoil by shovel, put it onto a wagon and dumped it over the existing rows in the garden. This raises the level of the ground in the garden, but also will still allow the roots of our plants to reach the good, rich, worm-filled, microbe-laden soil that we have worked so hard to build over the years.

You can see the results of our work on about a third of the garden below.  A one inch rain packed it in after we dumped the dirt and smoothed it over the garden rows.  It looks like we tilled it, but we didn't.  It completely covered the existing ground, and the only thing you can see growing is a few stalks of sorghum that came up volunteer.  I'm allowing that to mature and I'll save the grain for seed.

I would assume that our work lifted the ground level in the garden by about three inches and once I pull up rows, the new level should be about 4 and 1/2 or 5 inches higher than it was last year.  I'm thinking that will really help out during future 'monsoon seasons.'  This year I actually had potatoes and beets that rotted in the ground.

In some areas of the garden, especially on the lower side, I had really high rows pulled up in which the ground level was high enough.  In those areas, I simply filled in the furrows between the rows with the topsoil.  

Filled in furrows between the rows

We've almost moved the entire load of topsoil into the garden.  I won't have enough topsoil to build up the entire garden area, and I estimate that I'll have about 1/4 of the garden area remaining, but that's okay.  I'll put that on the to do list for next year as I will be pulling up rows and planting the fall/winter garden over the next couple of weeks and I'm running out of time.  No worries, I'll pull up high rows and fill the furrows with chopped leaves and compost and the rainfall will flow around the garden in the pasture.

Project for next year!

Jennings, Louisiana sits at an elevation of 26 feet, 3 inches above sea level.  Higher ground.  That's what we're looking for - in our garden and in our spiritual lives, too:

I want to scale the utmost height

And catch a gleam of glory bright;

But still I’ll pray till rest I’ve found,

“Lord, lead me on to higher ground.”