Video: Hot Pepper Cadets Class of 2020

Every fall I make a slow fermented hot sauce from the peppers in the garden. The base pepper is always the same, a Thai/Cayenne cross I call “Hidden Lake Hot”, but the second pepper changes every year. This year it’s one of the peppers I got from a friend from the Honduras.

Most of his peppers have no official names, just descriptors like “chili arbolito” (little tree pepper) and “amarillo y caliente” (yellow and hot), but one he calls “culebra negra” (black snake), which sounds super cool, so that’s the one I’m growing as the second pepper for the hot sauce.

This year is my 20th batch, so I doubled the number of pepper plants with the hope of filling a 5 gallon oak cask that I’ll be doing the fermenting in. Here’s a quick video of the plants in early July.

As you may be able to see, some of the plants have just begun to flower, so I’m hoping that we’ll begin with the first run of peppers by late August and finish with the last additions some time in late October or early November.