With the first freeze of the season coming in, I went out and did the final harvest off the fall garden - tomatoes, bell peppers, Tepin peppers and okra. The okra wasn't much as I harvest those daily - the take was 6 little dinky 1/2" to 2-1/2" pods.
I gleaned over 35# of Celebrity, Better Boy and Roma tomatoes, 8-1/2# of bell peppers in various stages of ripeness and 13 ounces of Tepins.
After giving my brother, B-in-L and nephew large sacks of the produce after this morning's deer hunting session, I laid out the remaining green tomatoes on the treadmill to ripen over time. They won't taste as good as vine ripened, but they'll still be better than store bought. A while back I had a bumper fall crop and the week of Thanksgiving that year I pulled in 13 5 gallon buckets of green tomatoes. The last of them ripened to eating stage in MARCH.
And here is the final take on my Chili Tepins. Tepins are extremely hot native peppers, the ancestor of all peppers of the Americas. They can range from 50K to over 160K on the Svoville Heat Index, depending on the environmental conditions under which they were grown. Green ones are hotter than ripe ones. It takes 70 to 100 tepins to make an ounce of peppers. The spring peppers tend to be pencil eraser sized while the fall ones tend to average smaller.
Other names for the Tepin is Chiltepin, Turkey Peppers, Bird's Eye Peppers and Bird Peppers - Turkey because native turkeys love them, Bird's Eye because they are about the size of a bird's eye, Bird because birds in general love them. The primary method of new plant distribution is via birds eating them and pooping out seeds.
They ARE NOT Chili Pequins. Pequins are different variety altogether. The stem and leaf structure is different and the heat of a pequin is different from that of a tepin. 50K-160K vs 35K to 50K on heatness. The tepin heat is intense but short-lived. Pequin heat is not as intense but is drawn out in duration. The tepin is round to kind oval and the pequin is oval with a point and nearly 3x the size of a tepin.
A picture of pequins for reference - snitched from the internet since I don't grow pequins.
She's a killer!! She wouldn't turn her head so the flash got her eyes!
Lol
