Chilli Harvest
- Chilli plant
One of our chilli plants just doesn’t give up. Who cares if it’s the dead of winter? Not our plant. (Note the basil just to the right of the chilli plant. It’s not giving up either.)
drying chillies
Frank and I have been talking about harvesting the fruit of this bush for a while now without settling on the right way to store the chillies (this harvest is too much even for us to use in our cooking). Frank was leaning towards making a chilli paste ala gochujang, a delicious chilli paste we fell in love with in Korea. I was leaning towards drying them.
I win! Frank agreed that we should string them together and make a chilli rope.
Below is pictured today’s full harvest, complete with some mandarins. We’re eating 6-10 a day and you can’t even tell we’ve touched the tree.
My surplus basket problem is resolving itself. I keep one in the house for when I go out to cut greens. The other lives under the house for when I’m out and decide to harvest something but have left my basket upstairs. The downstairs basket gets a lot more use than the upstairs one.
Laura Rittenhouse's Gardening Journal 
Mandarin marmalade, perhaps? If you make some, I will help you eat it!
Generally we eat the mandarins fresh, using a few for cooking (I made a fantastic batch of mandarin and poppy seed friands recently), so even when we get a bumper crop, there doesn’t seem to be enough for marmalade. We turn the kumquats into marmalade though as they’re a bit too bitter for us to be able to eat the full harvest.