What to do with too many chillies

Everyone loves a bargain, and the closer you get to paying almost nothing, the better the buzz. Bargains are different from freebies, of course. For a bargain, you have to pay at least a few cents, and today's gardening bargain probably has cost me at least 25 cents. I'll be coming back for more.

Way back in 2016, this little gardener bought some of his favourite largish red chillies at the supermarket. I saved the seeds from one of them, popped eight plump seeds into a punnet of potting mix, all eight came up in a week or so, and now, a few months later, I am harvesting my bargains.

I like these bigger than average chillies (they're about 3 inches long). They still have a chilli kick but it isn't too savage. And as I think I've mentioned before in this blog, I like to just toss a whole chilli into a tomato sauce and let it slowly infuse what the Italian restaurant menus like to call "a touch of chilli". Civilised heat.

I've always been fond of growing chillies, and if you are a beginner gardener they are one of your best bets for success. Chillies love life, and most of the time you should succeed in getting a colourful crop.

Yes, they do need a sunny spot, and yes, they like some fertiliser and a steady supply of water when they are young plants. The only extra care my chilli bushes received was the support from a garden stake. As the fruit grows, the plants can become top-heavy and blow over easily, so tying the trunk of the bush to a sturdy little stake will let the bush get on with the business of producing a bumper crop of fruit.

I love how chillies turn from green to red, almost in the blink of an eye. A few days ago all my chillies looked like this: very green.

And now they're turning into that vivid red. This one would have been green two days ago, and tomorrow it should be entirely red.

So, what do I plan to do with my glut of chillies? They keep quite well in the crisper section of the fridge, for a week or two, so some of them will go there for general use in all sorts of meals. 

Another big batch will become my "Sambal Ulek" chilli paste, which is an Indonesian basic ingredient (alternatively spelled sambal oelek).

At its simplest, Sambal Ulek is just minced chillies, preserved with some salt and vinegar. Whizz it all in a blender, pop it in a clean jar and it keeps in the fridge for several weeks at least.

If you go searching for Sambal Ulek recipes online you'll find people adding in extras such as garlic, ginger, lemon grass, shrimp paste, fish sauce, vegetable oil and sugar (as well as the salt and vinegar).

And opening up the spice-stained pages of my beloved bible of Asian cookery, Charmaine Solomon's Complete Asian Cookbook, she suggests substituting tamarind liquid for the vinegar, but her recipe is just salt, vinegar or tamarind liquid, and chillies. Nothing else.

However, to keep things basic, try this Sambal Ulek for starters. Aim for 2 teaspoons salt and 1 teaspoon sugar per cup of chopped chilli, and enough vinegar to turn the fairly stiff chopped mixture into a paste in your blender (so just add a tablespoon of vinegar at a time until it's a paste — for 1 cup of chopped chillies this should be 1-2 tablespoons vinegar). Oh, and whatever you do wear disposable gloves from beginning to end when handling big amounts of chilli. They prevent regrets.

Some people add a surface covering of peanut oil to the paste in the jar, to help seal it up. Of course store it in the fridge at all times, and if it ever changes in the way it looks, that's your big signal to be sensible and throw it all out.

Salads in pots

Everyone I greeted on my usual Saturday morning walk up to Marrickville Road and back seemed to be of the opinion that today's weather is just about perfect. A beautiful day, a Goldilocks summer's day. Just right. Not too hot, such a gentle breeze you hardly notice it, and the shade of buildings and trees feels as cool and refreshing as a drink of lemonade. Shame it isn't like this every day of summer, so all you can do on a day like this is enjoy it while you can.

The problem with summer here in Sydney is that these lovely days are outnumbered by the hotter days, the searing days when the moment you step outside you can feel your bare skin slowly burning. 

Sadly, this hot season isn't a great time to grow salad greens. That's ironic, as it's the ideal time to enjoy light meals of a grill with a salad on the side. My usual sunny vegie beds are just too hot for salad greens to last long in summer. Forget to water them just one day, or believe the morning weather forecasts of 'showers' and not bother to water the garden on a day that turned out to be dry and sunny yet again, and salad greens soon wilt and die. If they survive, they get through their life-cycle in what seems like a fortnight, shooting to seed in no time.

And so, the solution I use is to grow small crops of salad greens in pots, and put the pots in spots which get nice morning sun, then little or no sizzling afternoon sun. It works, but the trick with salads in pots is to water them every day, and don't trust the weather people. 

This is the basic set-up for two, a pot of rocket in
front, and some mixed greens at the back.
Apart from watering daily, the other trick is light
liquid feeds, especially after you've harvested
a big swathe of leaves.

This is a pot of radish seedlings, a new addition to the mix.
I love the way radish seed sprout in 4 or 5 days.

These are red and brown mignonette lettuce seedlings, which
also came up from seed in just four days. They need mollycoddling
in this heat, so I'm keeping them in a cooler spot to let them
grow up to about 7-10cm tall, then I'll cram the healthiest
healthiest half-dozen seedlings into a wide, shallow pot,
mixing up the two leaf colours for a nice looking effect.

Finally, a little experiment. Hopefully you can see the little
ruby coloured seedlings in the photo. These are a new idea
from Yates seeds, sent to us by the lovely Judy Horton of
Yates to try out. It's a new range called Microgreens, quick-
growing salad greens which you harvest when they're baby sized.
So far so good, they've come up quickly, in five days.

Judy sent us four packets to try. Our little red
babies are the 'Cabbage Rubies'. The idea is
that you sow about half a whole packet of the
seeds in a small (10cm) pot. You can grow
them indoors, on a windowsill, but I'm
growing ours outside. As the seed packet
says "pick in 2-3 weeks". That's what we'll do.

Some seed packets give you too little growing
info, but Yates can't be accused of that. There
are enough instructions here to give even the
most basic beginner some confidence.

 So, if your salad greens in the garden bed are having a tough time of it here in Australia right now, you're not alone with that problem. My tip is to go potty until autumn. I prefer a mixture of leaves, so those 'mesclun' mixes are perfect for pots. The one great thing about pots is that you can move them to the 'perfect' spot that gets the right mix of sun and shade in summer. The problem with pots is that they're a bit more work, but all that really means is daily watering, before you head off for work.

My freebie salad bowl

Oh goody, free seeds attached to the cover of the magazine! In this case it was the mag I work for, but free seeds are free seeds and every time I get some from whatever quarter, I like to have a go at sowing and growing them. In the case of our mag, I do it to make sure they actually work. In the past we've given away stacks of different tomato seeds and they've all been a roaring success, if the letters and photos from readers is any guide, but this time the freebie to lure in magazine buyers was this packet of free seeds which came attached to the September issue.

It's called the 'micro-salad mix' and the idea is
that you sow them thickly and harvest them as
baby greens (which hopefully regrow after you
pick them – well, that's the theory). The seed
packet says it's a mix of Amaranthus mira,
beet 'Detroit', corn salad  and spinach.

So far so good with the first stage. Instead of being careful I
just grabbed a small handful of seed (about one quarter of the
whole packet) and scattered them evenly over the potting
mix, and covered the seed with a light coating of seed-raising
mix. They took about 10 days to sprout, and this is how they
looked after another two to three weeks. The pellets on the
surface are some slow-release fertiliser I added.

Since then I have been harvesting, regrowing, harvesting,
regrowing etc etc, applying some organic liquid plant food
about once a fortnight. This photo was taken last week,
on Wednesday, of me harvesting with scissors, cutting off
enough salad greens for a little salad for lunch that day.

The nice thing about the seed mix is that no matter where or
how you cut, you end up with a 'mixed' green salad.

And here's the same bowl, photo taken from the same angle,
six days later. Now, I'm not sure if the cut-off plants have
regrown, or other plants once suppressed in the thick jungle
of competing greens have finally got their opportunity to grow
and thrive, but whatever the sequence, I'm harvesting a steady
supply of mixed salad greens from this one bowl, and the
plants bounce back from harvesting literally within days.
One big tip: apply lots and lots of water to keep all those
competing plantlets happy – it's a thirsty bowl!

So, our free seeds work very nicely, it seems. I'm so impressed that I'm now going to scrounge the office to see if there are any spare seed packets anywhere, so I can keep the supply up for as long as possible into next year.

One interesting little snippet about free seeds on magazine covers is that we have discovered a perverse way of rating their popularity. The obvious yardstick would be magazine sales (it works!), but we've found another popularity meter: thefts! You would not believe the number of people who contact us to say they bought the magazine but there weren't any free seeds attached, someone must have stolen them and could they have some. I am of course shocked and appalled to think that some of my fellow gardeners would be light-fingered thieves, but apparently it's true! 

Nevertheless, whether you stole your seeds or bought them, I hope they worked just fine for you. I'm planning to be a salad bowl farmer from now on.