Fish pepper harvest

Fish peppers are a gorgeous addition to either a vegetable garden or an ornamental bed, with their variegated foliage and multi-colored fruit, and as an African-American heirloom of the Chesapeake region, they're a real local specialty as well.

We grew them not too successfully in the Derwood demo garden this year (I foolishly tucked both seedling plants into places where they'd get as little sun as possible. Hey, the next-door plants were shorter then...) but those I had in my home garden did wonderfully. Anticipating cold weather, I got in the harvest, some of which looked like this:

Then I put most of the peppers (which are in the middle range of hotness, by the way) in the food dehydrator and let it run. Good for clearing the sinuses! Here's the end product:

And much more where that came from! Enough to keep us warm all winter, whether it's fish or something else that needs heating up.

The Fall 2009 issue of Washington Gardener has an interview with heirloom gardener Michael Twitty in which he extols the virtues of fish peppers, and much more. Really beautiful in your garden, and delicious too.