A tropical storm driven sunset

With the building El Niño pushing very warm water up off our coast, we’re receiving more than our usual share on hot, tropical weather.

We owe this view to tropical storm Polo which crossed the Baja peninsula the other day. When a tropical system churns off the coast of Baja, it pushes thin, high-altitude cirrus clouds hundreds of miles north into Southern California.

As the sun dips beneath the horizon, its light travels through a thicker layer of atmosphere, filtering out blue light and illuminating the underside of these high clouds with vibrant oranges and deep pinks. Combine that high-altitude canvas with crepuscular shadow rays, and you get sky-on-fire evenings like this one over the Pacific here in Northern San Diego County.

After 26 years of making my own hot sauce, I’ve learned that the best batches come from the simplest recipe and a lot of patience. Here’s my long-ferment method, step by step.

Hidden Lake Hot Cayenne-Thai hybrid peppers on the plant

For the past several years, I’ve been fermenting a big mixed bag of peppers. Mild ones like jalapeño and serrano, medium ones like Aleppo and Fish peppers, and a few scorchers like habanero and Scotch bonnet. In theory, that sounds like a recipe for layers of complex flavor. In practice, the ferments got a little wild. Some batches came out oddly sweet. Others had a funk I can only describe as “dirty feet.” Neither one is a flavor I want to shake onto my eggs.

So this year, I went back to basics: one pepper, a longer ferment, and more patience. Last year’s version of this post covered the quick, two-to-four-week method. This one is the slow version, and after comparing the two for a couple of decades, I think it’s the better sauce.

Live and Learn: Why My Mixed-Pepper Ferments Went Sideways

Fermentation is a group project. The Lactobacillus bacteria you want are competing with wild yeasts and other microbes for the sugars in the peppers. When everything’s balanced, the lacto bacteria win, the brine sours, and you get that clean, tangy flavor that makes Frank’s and Tabasco taste the way they do.

Throw a dozen pepper varieties in the jar, and you’re changing the balance in a few ways:

• Different sugar loads. Fruity peppers like habaneros and Scotch bonnets carry more natural sugar than a lean cayenne-type pepper. Extra sugar gives wild yeasts more to eat. Yeasts make alcohol and fruity compounds, not the lactic acid you’re after, and that’s where the odd sweetness comes from.
• Different skins, walls, and ripeness. Thick-walled jalapeños, thin-skinned Thai types, and wrinkly Aleppos all break down at different speeds, so the jar is never really fermenting “one thing.”
• More room for off-flavors. When the good bacteria don’t take over quickly, other microbes get a foothold. Some produce compounds like butyric and isovaleric acids. Isovaleric acid is the same compound behind the smell of sweaty socks, so “dirty feet” is more literal than it sounds.

None of this made the sauce unsafe. The salt and acid still did their jobs. But it made every batch a coin toss, and after 26 years I’d rather have a sauce I know I’ll love.

Meet “Hidden Lake Hot”: My Homegrown Hot Sauce Pepper

Fresh picked HLH peppers for the ferementer

The pepper I went back to is one I’ve been growing for decades, a Cayenne–Thai cross I developed here and call Hidden Lake Hot, or HLH for short. I’ve saved seed from the best plants year after year, and it’s become my all-purpose pepper. It dries beautifully, it’s great fresh, and it has just the right amount of heat: enough to get your attention without blowing out your taste buds.

Most importantly, it ferments like a dream. The thin walls and lean flesh break down evenly, the sugar is modest, and a long ferment brings out a savory, slightly smoky complexity that I’ve never gotten from a mixed jar.

It has one more big advantage here in San Diego: HLH keeps flowering and fruiting well into December. Instead of picking everything at once, I can harvest a fresh batch every week and keep feeding the jar for months. That’s what makes the long-ferment method below possible.

Don’t have HLH? No problem. The method works with any single pepper variety, or a blend of two similar peppers (think cayenne and Thai, or cayenne and Tabasco). Pick peppers with similar heat, thin walls, and not too much fruity sweetness, and stick with them all season.

The Long-Ferment Timeline

Here’s what six months of hot sauce looks like on the calendar:

Six months sounds like a long time to wait for hot sauce, I know. But most of that is waiting, not working. And the payoff is a sauce that tastes the same from the first bottle to the last.

Equipment & Ingredients

Equipment

• Glass jar or fermentation crock (I start with a 1-gallon jar). Glass, ceramic, or food-grade plastic all work. Just avoid metal, which reacts with the acidic brine.
• Pickling weight. A glass fermentation weight, or a zip-top bag filled with brine (not plain water, in case it leaks).
• Airlock lid (strongly recommended). For a two-week ferment, a regular lid you burp every few days works fine. For a six-month ferment, an airlock lets gas escape without letting air in, which keeps Kahm yeast and mold down.
• Blender or stick blender.
• Fine mesh sieve or cheesecloth.
• pH test strips or an inexpensive pH meter. Optional, but nice to have at bottling time.

Ingredients

• Hot peppers: About 1 lb to start, plus 8–16 oz per week after that
• Kosher salt: 3 Tbsp per quart of water (2 Tbsp if you’re using fine table or pickling salt)
• Chlorine-free water: Distilled, filtered, or tap water that’s been boiled or left out for 24 hours
• White or cider vinegar: For bottling day

How to Make Slow-Fermented Hot Sauce

Step 1) Make the brine

Stir 3 Tbsp of kosher salt into each quart of water until it’s completely dissolved. Make an extra quart and keep it in the fridge, because you’ll be topping off the jar every time you add peppers.

Step 2) Start the jar

Wash your first pound of peppers, trim off the stems, and pack them into the jar. No need to slice them or remove the seeds. Pour in enough brine to cover them completely, tap the jar to knock out air bubbles, and set your weight on top so everything stays submerged. Seal it with the airlock lid.

Starting the peppers with a little salt and chlorine-free water

Step 3) Let it get going

Keep the jar at room temperature, out of direct sunlight. Somewhere between 65°F and 80°F is ideal. Within a week or so, the brine should turn cloudy, bubble occasionally, and smell pleasantly sour. That’s the Lactobacillus taking over.

Step 4) Feed the jar every week

Once the ferment is active, add 8–16 oz of freshly washed peppers each week. Here’s how I do it:

1. Wash your hands and any tools you’ll use. Every time you open the jar, you’re letting in air and wild yeast, so keep it clean and quick.
2. Lift out the weight and push the new peppers down into the brine.
3. Top off with your extra brine at the same 3 Tbsp per quart ratio. Adding plain water dilutes the salt, which gives the unwanted microbes an opening.
4. Put the weight back, make sure everything’s submerged, and seal it up.

Here’s a nice bonus of the rolling method: each new batch of peppers drops into brine that’s already sour and full of the good bacteria. The established ferment gives the newcomers a head start and helps crowd out the troublemakers, which is a big reason the flavor stays consistent.

Running out of room? If your jar fills up before the peppers stop coming, just transfer everything (peppers, brine, and all) into a larger container and keep going. I move mine into an old 5-gallon homebrew bucket, but any bigger glass jar, crock, or food-grade bucket will do.

Fermenting peppers after week 3’s addition

Step 5) Let it rest through the winter

When the plants finally slow down (for me, that’s usually mid-December), I make one last addition, then move my fermenter to a cool spot in the garage. In San Diego, winter garage temperatures hover in the 50s and low 60s, which is perfect. At that temperature, fermentation slows way down, and the sauce spends the next couple of months quietly mellowing and developing flavor.

Check it every couple of weeks. If you see a flat, white film on top, that’s Kahm yeast. It’s harmless, so just skim it off. If you see anything fuzzy, or blue, green, black, or pink, that’s mold. Throw the batch out and start over. It’s rare with an airlock and a good weight, but over a six-month ferment it’s worth keeping an eye on.

Step 6) Blend, strain, and bottle (late February to early March)

1. Pour the peppers and brine into a large pot and blend them until smooth with a stick blender (or use a regular blender, then pour into the pot).
2. Stir in vinegar at a 1-to-1 ratio with the pepper mash.
3. Press the mixture through a fine sieve or cheesecloth to remove the seeds and pulp.
4. Warm the sauce gently over low heat to cook off some of the water, until it’s about the consistency of Frank’s or Tabasco.
5. Funnel it into clean bottles and cap them.

If you have pH strips, now’s a good time to use them. A finished sauce should read 4.0 or lower. Between the fermentation and the vinegar, yours will almost certainly come in well under that.

Use a mesh strainer or cheesecloth to remove the seeds and pepper pulp

Step 7) Age it one more month

Here’s the hardest part: store the bottles in a cool, dark place and leave them alone for about a month. This lets the vinegar and ferment blend into one smooth, tangy flavor instead of tasting like two separate things. Once you open a bottle, it’ll keep at room temperature for months, though I keep mine in the fridge to hold the color and heat longer.

Fresh bottles of slow fermented hot sauce ready to age for another month

Is a 6-Month Ferment Really Worth It?

After 26 years of making it both ways, my answer is yes. The quick two-to-four-week method from last year makes a perfectly good hot sauce, and it’s a great place to start if you’ve never fermented peppers before. But the slow version is where the sauce gets its depth. The heat and the tang are balanced, the flavor is more savory than sweet, and every bottle tastes like the last one.

Tabasco reportedly ages its pepper mash for up to three years, so six months is practically fast food.

Safety & Troubleshooting FAQs

Is a long ferment safe? What about botulism?

Yes. The salt keeps harmful bacteria in check while the lacto bacteria get established. Once they do, the brine becomes acidic enough that botulism can’t grow (that bacterium needs a pH above 4.6). The vinegar you add on bottling day pushes the acidity even further into the safe zone.

Can I really keep adding fresh peppers to a jar that’s already fermenting?

Yes, as long as you keep everything submerged and top off with brine at the same salt ratio. The established, acidic ferment actually protects the new peppers.

My ferment slowed way down in the garage. Is that a problem?

Nope, that’s the point. Cool temperatures slow the microbes down so the flavors can mellow. It’ll pick right back up if the weather warms.

There’s white film on top. Is it mold?

A flat, white film is Kahm yeast, which is harmless, so just skim it off. Fuzzy growth, or anything colored, is mold. Toss the batch.

How do I know it’s ready to bottle?

The bubbling has stopped, the brine is cloudy, and it smells clean and sour, like sauerkraut or sourdough starter. If you have pH strips, the brine should read 4.0 or lower.

Is this your first time fermenting hot sauce? Start with last year’s quick-ferment guide, then graduate to the long version next fall. And if you’ve ever had a ferment go sideways, I’d love to hear about it in the comments. I’ve got a few “dirty feet” stories of my own.

My DIY swamp cooler keeping the family room cool

If you live anywhere in SoCal or the Southwest right now, you know the drill. There’s a monster high-pressure system parked over the Four Corners, pushing daytime temperatures well into the 90s (and high 80s right along the coast). To make matters worse, it’s dragging up sticky moisture from the Gulf of California.

When it gets this hot, running central AC isn’t just loud, with California’s current electricity rates, it feels like taking out a second mortgage just to get through August.

A few years ago, after balking at the $400 price tag for commercial evaporative coolers, I decided to build a simple DIY Bucket Swamp Cooler. The verdict? It actually works.

While it won’t drop a scorching room down to a crisp 72°F, it drastically slows down how fast your house heats up. Best of all, it runs on a single low-wattage desk fan (around 35 watts). You can run this thing all day for mere pennies of electricity.

Note: Thanks to inflation over the past few years, building this today costs closer to $50 than the original $30, but it’s still a microscopic fraction of what a portable AC unit—and its power bill—will cost you!

How It Works (The TL;DR)

This project uses a double-bucket setup. A desk fan mounted on the lid forces warm room air down into an outer bucket, surrounding an inner bucket packed with chilled water or ice jugs. The air picks up the chill, passes through the connecting pipes, and vents out into your living space as a refreshing breeze.

Diagram of a simple bucket swamp cooler

What You’ll Need

Pro-Tip: If you have leftover plumbing bits, paint buckets, or an old desk fan in the garage, your total cost will drop to almost nothing.

Supplies

• 2 Buckets with 1 Lid: One 10-gallon bucket with a lid, and one 5-gallon bucket (Or scale down to a 5-gallon and a 3-gallon for smaller rooms).
• Pipe (2-inch diameter): About 36 inches of 2-inch PVC or black ABS drain pipe.
• 1 Desk Fan: An inexpensive 11-inch or 12-inch desk fan (around 35 watts).
• Reusable Ice: Two 1-gallon water jugs, chilled in the fridge or frozen overnight.

Tools

• Drill
• ½-inch drill bit
• 2-inch hole saw bit
• Small hacksaw or jab saw
• Tape measure & pencil

Step-by-Step Build Guide

Step 1: Mark & Drill the Outer Bucket

1. 1. Use your tape measure to mark three evenly spaced points around one side of the larger (10-gallon) bucket.

2. Attach your 2-inch hole saw bit to the drill and cut three clean holes.

Marked bucket ready to have holes drilled

Step 2: Drill the Inner Bucket

1. Nest the smaller (5-gallon) bucket inside the larger one, centering it carefully. (Use a couple of scrap wood blocks or pipe offcuts to hold it centered if needed.)
2. Using the holes in the outer bucket as your visual guide, drill three matching 2-inch holes into the inner bucket.

Step 3: Cut & Insert the Vent Pipes

1. Cut your 2-inch pipe into three equal lengths (approx. 10 inches each).
2. Pass the pipes through the outer holes into the inner bucket. Letting them extend about 10 inches helps direct and distribute the airflow much better into the room.

Step 4: Modify the Lid for the Fan

1. Measure the face of your desk fan. You want to cut an opening in the 10-gallon lid that lets maximum airflow pass through without letting the fan body fall inside.
2. Easy compass trick: Poke a small starter hole in the center of the lid, tie a pencil to a string, and trace a circle to match your fan’s size.
3. Drill a access hole along the trace line, pop your hacksaw blade through, and cut out the circle.

Step 5: Fire It Up!

1. Position your new “swamp cooler” in the room where air can circulate freely (elevating it on a plant stand works great if you have pets or kids crawling around!).
2. Place your frozen or chilled 1-gallon water jugs inside the inner bucket.
3. Pop the lid on, place the desk fan face down over the opening, and turn it on high.

Boom—instant conditioned air!

Real-World Results: Does It Actually Work?

Short answer: Yes, absolutely—if you manage your expectations.

The Cooling Strategy

Our usual Southwest summer protocol is opening windows at night to capture the cool breeze, then closing everything up around 7:00 AM. Normally, even with shades down, indoor temperatures creep into the mid-to-high 80s by 2:00 PM.

The Test Run

During a brutal stretch of high-90s heat, we turned the bucket cooler on early in the morning right after locking down the house:

• Without the bucket cooler: Indoor temps rose by about 2°F every hour.
• With the bucket cooler: Indoor temps rose by less than 1°F every two hours.

Throughout a 5-day heatwave, our main living space never climbed above 82°F.

The Big Takeaway (Live & Learn)

Here’s the honest truth from real-world testing: This unit doesn’t chill a hot room down; it slows down how fast a cool room heats up.

Two gallons of frozen/chilled water reach room temperature in about 2 to 3 hours. If you wait until your living room is already an 88°F sauna to turn this on, it won’t do much. But if you start it early in the morning when the house is still cool, it acts as a thermal brake, holding back the heat until the sun starts setting in the evening.

For roughly $50 in parts and an afternoon of simple DIY work, it’s a game-changer for surviving humid Southwest heat waves on a budget!

Tree Aeonium doesn’t look like much in its summer dormancy

The lush, green of spring has officially left the building. In its place? Some of our absolute favorite succulents are starting to look, well… kind of haggard.

If you have Aeoniums (those gorgeous, rosette-forming beauties) sitting out in the full afternoon sun, you might be looking at them with a sense of creeping dread. Right now, many of them have probably dropped almost all their lower leaves, leaving nothing but long, bare, woody stems with a small, fist of red or purplish leaves clinging to the very tip.

Aeonium aroborium in its summer dormancy stage

Your first instinct might be to panic, grab the garden hose, and drown them in water to “save” them.

My advice? Drop the hose and step away from the plant. Let’s talk about why your succulents are actually acting brilliant right now.

The Summer Nap: Understanding Succulent Dormancy

Here’s the secret that big-box nurseries don’t always print on the plastic plant tags: many succulents don’t grow year-round. In fact, a huge portion of them do the exact opposite of what traditional garden plants do. They go completely dormant in the dead of summer.

Aeoniums, Dudleya (our beautiful California natives), Senecio (like Blue Chalksticks), and Cotyledon evolved in dry, quasi-desert climates with hot, bone-dry summers and cool, wet winters. When the temperature spikes in July, these plants hit the pause button.

To protect themselves from drying out, they pull off a pretty incredible survival trick:

1. They drop their lower leaves to reduce the surface area that loses water to evaporation.
2. They curl their remaining leaves inward into tight, dense cups to shield their growing core from the intense sun.
3. They slow their metabolism to a near-complete halt.

Those long, bare stems with the tiny red fists at the end? That isn’t a dying plant. That’s a healthy, highly adapted plant going into power-saver mode. The red color is actually a natural “sunscreen” (anthocyanin) the plant produces to protect itself from UV rays.

Aeonium in winter (L) versus summer (R)

The Golden Rule: Don’t Feed the Sleepers

Watering a dormant succulent is the gardening equivalent of dumping a bucket of ice water on someone while they are fast asleep. It doesn’t help them; it just shocks the system.

Because the plant’s roots have essentially gone to sleep for the season, they aren’t drinking. If you dump water into the soil right now, that moisture just sits there. Combined with hot summer soil, it’s the perfect breeding ground for fungal pathogens. You will literally cook and rot the roots.

The Summer Rule of Thumb: From July through September, let your Aeoniums and winter-growing succulents rest. Give them a splash of water maybe once every few weeks just to keep the soil from turning into literal concrete, but otherwise, leave them alone. They’ll wake up, open up, and explode with fresh green growth the second the weather cools down and the rains arrive in late autumn.

When It’s Actual Damage: Sunburn vs. Heat Stress

Now, there is a difference between a plant that is happily sleeping and one that is actively getting baked. Here is how to read your succulent’s body language right now:

Heat Stress (Totally Fine)

A jade plant changes leaf color to protect from the summer sun

• What it looks like: Deepening colors. Green echeverias turning bright pink on the edges; aeoniums turning dark burgundy or red; jade plants getting orange-red tips.
• The Verdict: This is normal and highly desirable! Stress colors are what make succulents so beautiful.

Actual Sunburn (Not Fine)

Sunburn on a jade plant with shriveling and black spots

• What it looks like: Permanent, beige, white, or black spots and scars across the leaves that face the afternoon sun. The tissue looks shriveled, papery, and dead.
• The Verdict: The sun is simply too intense for that specific spot.

The Quick Fix

If a succulent is getting genuinely sunburned, toss some shade cloth over it. If it’s in a pot, move it into the afternoon shadow of something else like a larger, heat-tolerant shrub. Don’t bother cutting off the sunburned leaves right now—they are acting as a shield for the leaves underneath. You can tidy them up in October.

The “Lemonading” Project: What to Do with Leggy Stems

If you absolutely can’t stand the look of those long, bare, woody stems, you don’t have to just live with them. You can use this time to plan a classic “garden lemonading” (as in “when life gives you lemons…”) project for when they wake up, or do a clean-up right now.

It’s easy to grow new plants from succulent cuttings

If you have a succulent that stretched out too much earlier in the spring and now just looks gangly, you can prune it and grow new ones:

1. Clip a Bit: Use a clean, sharp pair of pruners to snip the rosette off, leaving a few inches of stem attached to the head.
2. Let it Dry: Set that cutting aside in a dry, shady spot in your garage or porch. Leave it alone for a week or so. The cut end will dry out and grow a calloused “scab.” (If you stick a fresh, wet cut straight into soil, it will rot).
3. Replant: Once calloused, tuck the stem into a pot of dry, sandy succulent soil. Don’t water it until you see new roots start to form in a few weeks.
4. The Bonus: Leave the old, bare stem in the ground! More often than not, that “dead-looking” stick will start pushing out dozens of tiny, baby succulent “pups” along the sides by the time autumn hits.

The Takeaway: Live and Learn

Just about every expert gardener in the Southwest has accidentally killed a succulent by trying to “nurse it back to health” with a hose in July. If you’ve done that, don’t feel bad. It’s a rite of passage.

So, take a look at your yard this week with fresh eyes. Celebrate the weird, tight, woody little survivors. Wipe the dust off your sunglasses, pour yourself a cold drink, and give yourself (and your garden) permission to just chill out until fall.

24 pounds of fresh red onions from a pantry scrap

Whenever I bring it up, people almost always ask: “But how big is the actual yield?” My answer? It depends, but it’s always significantly more than what I originally paid for.

Take my recent red onion harvest, for example. What you see here is a little over 24 pounds of crisp, beautiful red onions. The crazy part? They all originated from a single, lonely onion that sprouted in my pantry a couple of springs ago.

Instead of tossing it in the compost, I tucked it into the soil, let it do its thing over the summer, and collected the seeds from its beautiful globe-like flowers in the fall. I sowed those exact seeds around Christmas, and by May, I had two 12-foot rows of sweet, vibrant red onions ready to pull.

Considering red onions usually run about $1.50 a pound at the store, that’s roughly $36 worth of fresh produce for the grand total of zero dollars. If you ask me, that’s a dang good return on investment.

Looking Ahead (and Learning as We Go)

The cycle doesn’t stop here. I already have a batch of yellow onion seedlings getting cozy in the greenhouse. In just a few weeks, they’ll be transplanted into the ground for a mid-to-late October harvest.

Looking even further ahead, the meteorologists are pointing toward an El Niño pattern for our next winter cycle. For us here in San Diego, that generally means a warmer, wetter winter. If the weather cooperates, my plan is to direct-seed outdoors in January and let Mother Nature handle the watering, hopefully setting us up for a super-sized harvest by late spring. (Of course, gardening in changing weather is always a bit of a gamble, but hey, that’s half the fun.)

Want to Try It Yourself?

Onions are just the gateway crop. There are plenty of fruits and vegetables sitting in your kitchen right now that are just waiting for a second life in the dirt.

If you want to save a few bucks and try this in your own backyard, check out my Grocery Store Garden Guide. It breaks down exactly what grows best in our region, a few of our favorite growing hacks, and (just as importantly) which store-bought scraps are actually worth your time and which ones you should just leave in the compost bin.