The Last HEAT Of Summer. (Bottled.)

A cautionary tale. Also a tale of reward for giving much compassion to the rejected. Here beginneth a lesson for all who care for the runts of the litter, move the piglet from the hindmost tit to a front seat, and are prepared to become Stewards Of Their Domaynes.

Okay Okay not so much. But the garden's been very giving this year. After having had to move six of our raised beds two years ago and reconditioning the soil over the space of a year, it's finally paying off. 

Well, we did have good crops as well, but they were nothing compared to the production we're now getting. I'm very glad so many things have turned out so well despite a LOT of challenges. I'll have a post about soil amendment on a pauper's budget ready soon, for now this is a more amusing (and surprising!) development.

The Rise And Wrath Of Capsicum Pubescens

I was going to post a video where a mad geek makes a chainsword out of a chainsaw and an electric power motor and then has at a ballistic gel zombie skull but it was a bit gruesome.

So here's a picture of a chilli I all unsuspectingly grew from one of a pair of neglected reject seedlings that I nursed through a whole winter in pots and then planted out earlier. This one is a Rocoto and I should have sussed when I cut its sibling open to find BLACK seeds inside.

A real, live grenade...

Anyway, I was about to make us dinner so I sliced a sliver off it to test it first - I like to adjust meals to low-medium sort of levels - and then had this thought that maybe I was going to perish, right there in the kitchen, 7 metres away from my beloved in the other room, because I couldn't yell.

I couldn't speak, I couldn't squeak, and where the hell was this tsunami of saliva coming from and why was it frothing? I grabbed the bottle of milk and managed to pour a glass, then pour that glass down my throat to - hopefully - cushion the shock to my system.

Because in a reflex I'd swallowed the damn thing and was mapping its progress by the fireball, and would someone please turn off the flood of spit now kthxbai? Because now I knew how these chillis killed, you basically dehydrated yourself as you poured all that slobber out.

After about an hour of (okay, less than five minutes of, felt a lot longer) this I got some feeling back in my face, some composure back, and regained the power of rational thought and so I casually sauntered out, sat down, and said to Kerry: "Ffad waff thmm therouff FFhilli" and I thought she looked at me a bit funny. What? I was speaking as well as I could under the circumstances.

Then she told me my upper lip was red, and my eyes really bloodshot, and said "you didn't actually put that in our dinner did ya? Say you didn't!" Yep. Apparently I look like a minor demon when I get a good hit of the old Scovilles.

For those playing along at home, a Jalapeno comes in at between 1,000 and maaaybe up to 7,000 Scoville units, Rocotos start at 40,000 and according to the scale I was checking top out around 300,000 Scovies. I've had (and tolerated) 150k Scoville chillis and this was definitely hotter so Imma say it was a 200-250k Scoville sort of rating.

Interesting snippet:

How do they measure Scoville units? They extract the capsacain from the chilli, mix it with sugar syrup, and keep diluting it until tasters can no longer discern the heat. So 1000 Scovilles is 1 part chilli juice to 1000 parts sugar syrup, and so on.

Supplementary reading:

https://pepperheadsforlife.com/the-scoville-scale/ the Scoville scale

Enjoy!

And yes, I am definitely keeping these and making a chilli sauce out of them! I have some Tabasco bottles and I reckon I can find a place for some orphan Scoville units in my future.

Endpiece:

The whole "gardening on a pauper's budget" thing: When we moved in here we were promised a long-term lease. (Back in the days before Form2 longterm leases.)  Before the aforementioned Form2 leases became available, our landlord had a domestic upheaval, and our house was part of the settlement. So we were up in the air for about a year. But we'd gone for broke moving in, spent money we didn't really have to make the backyard cat-proof, gazebo, garden shed, and a range of raised and in-ground garden beds made in various ways and filled with the best garden soil we could afford which was pretty crappy but I knew I could build it up.

So - six months setting it up and starting up, a year before Grant had his life-changing experiences, and then almost a year in limbo as the one-day-to-be new landlord checked it out and finally bought it. And immediately said we were good to stay on but they wanted to split the block in two. And yep ALL the things we'd done were in the part of the land the landlord wanted to split off, the part that we'd put all that money into...

To MMC's (new landlord(s) names obfuscated for their privacy) credit they immediately made us a (much smaller) front yard fenced so that I could easily make it cat-safe again. And he was okay with us putting as many raised beds as we wanted in the front. Basically that told us that we would be okay as long as we didn't set the house on fire or start selling the flashing off the roof. 

But the soil (we had to move the six little beds, just give up on the others and ditch them) hadn't really had a chance to start becoming productive, and sitting around baking in the sun while we moved beds and made the front yard ready. 

I've already made a post about the start of the new beds and a follow-up post on my other blog where some of the - . . . *ahem* . . . unique challenges we faced . . . are laid out plus the next phase. Anyhow. The other post I've alluded to about soil amendment will end up here on this blog in a few weeks. 

The Result:

In the first year of using the beds I was waiting for the worms to figure out there was tucker to be had in each bed (you can see what that's about in the first post mentioned in the last paragraphs) and meanwhile we had several crops out of the beds, rotating them between crops and cat litter boxes. 

Because we have cats and now they suddenly had a tiny yard less than 10% of the old yard, we either had to have multiple indoor litter boxes or assign one bed in rotation to the cats (and the worms doing their stuff) at each crop change. 

And as my soil amendments took effect, the crops tended to not die from water issues when it was hot, seeds germinated happily in winter under their blankets of organic matter, and what grew, grew much better. 

Brag time: I bought two very neglected chilli plants on the sale pile somewhere, about a year ago. I nursed them, they were basically skinny starveling sticks for six months, then had a crisis once they grew a few extra leaves, then recovered, and finally our weeding person put them - and two tomato seedlings - into one garden bed. I added some Italian sweet basil and some other herbs (I can't remember - some random seedlings from the collection...) underneath and the cherry tomato took off and it seemed it was going to drown everything under it.

I pinched out and pinched out and pinched out but this thing was implacable and unstoppable. And it's repaid us with 6 kilos so far and an estimated 10 kilos more still ripening. Meanwhile, the roma tomato behind it has about the same weight on it in green tomatoes, and - as I found out - the runt of the two 'charity chillies' had several fruits on it that were steadily ripening so I picked the ripest two for dinner... The other plant has some form of short dark-green jalapenos growing.

And an eggplant in another bed is also very late fruiting/ripening... And the spinach and chard and silverbeet have all already bolted - twice... And the herbs have all had a good season. And potato greens are everywhere, I'm thinking there'll be quite a few kilos of Kipflers later on.

Are You Bragging? 

Well yeah! Of course, I think I've learned and developed some good ways to make productive gardens on a tight budget. But also - sharing. 

Sharing how to get a garden going quickly and without huge expense or too much hard work. I like to share all these projects. I also like it if you share these and other of my posts - across all my blogs - with your friends. Because that gets me a few more readers, and that will - eventually, maybe, perhaps - actually earn me my first cheque from Google Ads. It just needs people reading, seeing the ads, and maybe clicking on an ad every now and then.

My other blogs deal with renewables, EVs, AI, recycling, and a whole fistful of other such issues.

If you're reading that and thinking "huh? What 'all my blogs' are you talking about?' then can I suggest maybe checking out my News Stand where you can see a live feed that lists all my posts as they get uploaded so you'll see them and the blogs they're made on. Or you could subscribe to my newsletter. It comes out once a week only and means you don't even have to remember to check.

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