Bringing the heat and flavour
Do you like a little spice in your life? If you do, then Rata Farms has something to really light up your tastebuds. Located on Lansdowne Road, Troy Dando and his team not only grow juicy strawberries but they also lovingly tend to a huge range of chilli plants. In their commercial glasshouse they produce dozens of varieties of chillis, from the mild and tasty to the searingly hot Carolina Reaper Chilli and some even hotter still.
I recently ventured out to Rata Farms to check out the chilli growing operation, and to find out just who is brave or silly enough to eat the dangerously hot chocolate Primotalii chillis that they don’t sell to most retailers.
Chilli heat is measured by the Scoville scale and if you think jalapenos are hot at around 8000 Scoville units, the chocolate Primotalii chilis top out at over 2.2 million units.
Troy and his wife Jo both have fulltime jobs - he works on the tug boats at Port Nelson and Jo’s work in logistics means she has valuable skills in ensuring the fresh chillis reach their destination in perfect condition.
“We bought a rural property mainly for the land, but it had a couple of run down glasshouses and we didn’t have any idea what we were going to do on the property,” Troy says.
“We had travelled through Asia and love a bit of heat in our food and have always grown a few chillis at home so we decided to put them in the glasshouse, plant a few more and see what happens.”
The couple were lucky in some ways. The old glasshouses had been used for hydroponic production so there was a decent water pump and some pipes in place.
“We just had to clean the place up, get rid of some of the hydroponic growing troughs and alter the watering system to supply water and liquid nutrients to the chillis that we grow in bags.”
Troy told me that while they grew a few things in their home garden they had absolutely no experience growing on a commercial scale.
“We had no idea what we were doing but there’s a huge amount of information on the internet and others growing chillis are only too happy to offer advice.”
Their first commercial crop was planted in the 2022-23 season with mixed results, after a late start.
For the current 2023-24 season the couple gathered seeds from around New Zealand as well as retaining some seeds from the first harvest. While they have around 50 different chilli varieties growing at the moment they are also growing isolated plants of some varieties to gather seeds from. “We knew we had to learn as we go rather than growing thousands of plants in the first year, we needed to learn about how to grow on a commercial scale properly, what works on our property and what we need to change.”
Troy and Jo have adopted the fertigation system of growing, best described as the application of liquid fertilisers through an irrigation system. It is used widely in the agriculture sector to help control the amount of nitrogen being leached into ground water.
“Also, we don’t spray anything nasty on our plants, we use companion planting and use natural sprays like Neem oil and buy in predatory insects like lady bugs and some types of wasps.”
The couple currently grow about 50 varieties of chilli but have seeds for another 300 varieties going through quarantine. They are also developing their own varieties by cross-breeding existing varieties.
“We are aiming to get great flavour as well as balanced heat levels. Some of our current chillis are just too hot to sell to the general market, they only go to selected customers. ”We also sell our main crop of cayenne chillies to Turners & Growers for general distribution but only a few supermarkets stock the super hots (over 1m Scovilles). We do sell direct to local customers and the rest of New Zealand via our website, Facebook or Instagram if you need to feel the burn”.
The couple eventually plan to move into processing chillies for Rata Farms sauces, salts and chilli powders.
Rata Farms has a farm shop that is open every day 7am - 7pm at 98 Lansdowne Road where you can buy fresh chillis and strawberries when they’re in season. Or buy them online at ratafarm.co.nz.