Red Hot Chili Peppers

Dear KCSA community,
 
What a crazy week! Tropical storms, electrical storms, burst creek banks, power outages and closed roads. Most members made it out to pick-up though! Got to get those veggies!
 
By the way, the Kennedy Bridge is reopened again. I am personally very glad about that as the downed trees and bridge closure increased my commute 20-fold last week! Although, looking on the bright-side, this did give me some phone charging time with the power out.
 
We are in another transitional period at the farm. Spring plantings have either ended or are coming to an end. Fall plantings are not quite ready yet. This usually means a little lull in the available greens. Not only is there a gap between plantings for spring and fall but any greens planned for summer usually struggle. Dill and cilantro are done for a while. Lettuce is touch and go as well. We’ll continue to try our best over the next few weeks but we are largely reliant on our summer crops. This means peppers, eggplants and tomatoes…oh my!
 
A new addition to u-pick this week are our red hot chili peppers! They’ll be on at a quart, so there is no need to give them a weigh, give them a weigh, give them a weigh, now…when harvesting. Please see our hot pepper identification guide for the hottest. Shishitos are now also on u-pick.


 

This week we have also started harvesting our famed Sullivan’s Favorite Italian Frying Pepper. For those not in the know, the Sullivan's are the original farmers of Kimberton CSA. They started the farm in 1987 along with the Kimberton Waldorf School and interested members in the community. That means Barbara and Kerry Sullivan were the first farmers in Pennsylvania, and the third in the U.S., to manage and run a CSA.

Now, from my understanding the Sullivan Favorite is derived from a hybrid Italian frying pepper. Clearly, the Sullivan's loved a challenge, as saving seed from a hybrid is a lot more complicated than saving pepper seed from an open pollinated (O.P.) variety.


For an O.P. variety, the seed has already been stabilized, so all you need to do is pick the traits you want to enhance in that variety, i.e., taste, size, color, and then save seed and resow that seed every year. However, with a hybrid, you also need to stabilize the peppers to ensure consistency when saving the seed from year to year.
 
To put this in perspective, after saving seed from a hybrid pepper and resowing that seed the second year, your plants will produce (on average) a third of the mama pepper, a third of the papa pepper and a third of the offspring pepper—the offspring pepper is the original hybrid you want to save. So, even before saving the offspring peppers, you need to identify and then dispose of the mama and papa pepper plants and then select peppers from the offspring plants with the traits you want to enhance.

Once you resow those offspring pepper seeds the third year, (on average) you will produce a sixth of the mama peppers, a sixth of the papa pepper and two thirds of the offspring pepper. After identifying and disposing of the mama and papa peppers again, you can select peppers from the offspring to resow the following year. This needs to continue for a couple more years to stabilize the seed as an O.P. variety (and still a mama and papa pepper plant might randomly appear)!

So, after many years of stabilizing the hybrid pepper, the Sullivan's started saving the seed for Turtle Tree Seed, a biodynamic seed saving workshop out of Camphill Village in Copake, NY. We continue to save the Sullivan Favorite seeds, following in the footsteps of the Sullivan's and our direct predecessors: Birgit and Erik Landowne. They really are a great tasting pepper!
 
Cheers,
Andrew

Andrew Turner