Chiltepin

It is extremely hot but has a great deal of variability. Start early indoors and transplant well after last frost. Expect 50,000-250,000 Scovilles depending on the season and your location.

God willing, I will harvest about 2000-3000lbs of chiltepin on or around the end of October, with another 2500lbs alvailable also. Chiltepin is called the Mother of all chiles and is native to Texas.

They can be dried like peppercorns or used fresh in salsa. Evidence indicates it has been consumed by humans as far back as 7,500 BC. (Chiltepin; Bird pepper) Small pea-sized red pepper thought to be the ancestor of the cultivated peppers.

Also known as the bird chile or Chiltepin, the tiny tepin pepper is as potent as it is petit. Tepin peppers grow wildly in Mexico and the American Southwest, but many people cultivate them to keep them for chile flakes, oils, and to craft burning home-canned...

Here in the Midwest, cayenne is an annual, so we plant it every year and harvest all we can for winter before doing it all over again. I use the powder in the kitchen to stop the bleeding when someone gets overzealous with a knife.

A long chain of drying chili peppers is called a ristra, and there's definitely an art to making a proper one. While in a traditional ristra you'd use a cotton string to tie groups of peppers together in a long chain, I get results using a far less official...