from my garden

Small-But-Mighty Hot Peppers

- Susan M. Brackney

Y'ou don't have to have a lot of garden space or an especially long growing season to succeed with hot peppers.

Several compact pepper types grow well in containers or other small spaces. Despite their more diminutive size, they can still pack a wallop.

"Smokin' Ed" Currie has been growing hot peppers in all shapes, sizes and colors for decades. "We're the largest organic pepper farm in the United States," he says. The owner and president of the South Carolina-based PuckerButt Pepper Co., Currie grows hundreds of different pepper varieties each year and he also holds the Guinness World Record for hottest pepper. His "Pepper X" pepper rates an average 2.7 million heat units on what's known as the Scoville Scale. (For the sake of comparison, some of the hottest jalapeño peppers you can grow range from 3,000 to 8,000 heat units on that same scale.) Currie also developed the previous record-holding pepper, "Smokin' Ed's Carolina Reaper," which delivers more than 1.5 million Scoville heat units.

Safety First!

"For people who are just getting started with growing peppers, we do recommend wearing some nitrile or plastic gloves when you're handling the seeds," Currie says. That goes for harvesting your peppers, too, because pepper seeds and the fruits themselves contain capsaicin-the same chemical found in selfdefense pepper spray products.

If you get capsaicin on your hands, eyes or mucous membranes, you'll feel the burn. Besides gloving up, it's always a good idea to wash your hands well after handling seeds or harvesting your peppers.

Types to Try

Starting with the hottest, here are a few small-but-mighty pepper varieties worth trying.