‘Tis the season to plant chillis. Tricia Watson, who runs the Napier company Orcona Chillis 'N Peppers business with her husband Alvin, told Kathryn Ryan on Nine to Noon how they grow their bounty.
The Watsons make about 20 different products to spice up your life, including relishes, pickles, sauces, and dried ingredients for cooking, as well as selling fresh chillis.
Photo: Flickr
Ms Watson, who admits she couldn’t tell which fruit was which when she and Alvin first bought the business, now wins awards for the company’s sauces.
The couple are the third owners of the 17 year-old business, which supplies speciality food stores, restaurants and farmers' markets.
"It was supposed to be a semi-retirement move, but it's very labour-intensive," Tricia says.
She drove past the business on her way to work each day and her husband, a plumber, was sick of his job, so they decided to buy it.
Now they grow 12 chilli varieties, from mild through to extra-hot. Their bread and butter are the jalapeno and cayenne peppers, as well as the milder chillis, Anaheim, which look longer and fatter, like capsicums.
But they’ve also been growing the infamously eye-watering ghost chillis and something they’ve dubbed “magmas,” which are "like molten lava in your mouth."
Here are Orcona’s tips for growing chillis:
- Start planting now to harvest in January or February. It takes about three months from seed to planting, with fruit ready to pick six weeks after that.
- Wear gloves for picking, although unless you break it open or cut the chillis - or you’re growing very hot varieties - your skin should be fine.
- Chillis prefer 27 degree heat as an optimum growing temperature. At Orcona, the growing sheds can get up to 50 degrees Celsius, which makes the chillis even hotter to taste!
- However, while they love direct sunlight, they can also burn, so take care. Orcona keeps a sun shade over the capsicum, which are particularly prone to burning.
- Orcona’s capsicums are grown on strings, with the lateral shoots pruned out in order to develop bigger fruit.
- Rather than hydroponics, a process called "fertigation" is used to feed the plants, in which a nutrient mix is fed to the plants through a dripper for a few minutes an hour, eight or nine times a day.
- Orcona process their chillis on site in a commercial kitchen, using fresh chillis for relishes, and frozen for sauces. Frozen chillis keep for up to 12 months.
- A tip from Jamie Oliver: a frozen chilli can be grated into your food.
If you’re keen to cook with chilli tonight, try these recipes from our archives:
- Dame Alison Holst’s Tomato Salsa
- Superb Sweet Chilli Sauce
- And make your own fresh masala paste for this BBQ Masala Kahawai, with Naan Bread and Cucumber Yoghurt.
