Chillie-ing out in the garden
At Braehead Community Garden, we’re pretty hot on health and safety and try to ensure that nothing dangerous happens in the garden.
At least that’s what I thought until a chance conversation with one of our gardeners recently. He’s one of a select few in what I’m calling the clandestine chilli club. The odd thing about chillies is that over time you get used to the spiciness of them and need to find hotter varieties to feed your growing addiction to the tongue numbing pain. The heat or spiciness of chillies is measured using the Scoville Scale (named after Wilber Scoville, the American pharmacist who devised it in 1912). So a bell pepper gets a zero on the scale, a jalapeno gets about 10,000 points and a tabasco pepper gets around 30,000 points. In the chemist’s lab, the pepper spray we see on American cop shows gets around 750,000 points on the scale. However, chemists would appear to have nothing on amateur gardeners with too much time on their hands. Gardeners around the world are great at splicing and cross breeding plants to create ever more beautiful roses, or ever more bug-resilient grapes or whatever takes their fancy – so why not chillies. In 2007 the Guinness World Records certified that the“Ghost Pepper”was the world’s hottest chilli pepper at over one million points on the Scoville scale. That’s four hundred times hotter than Tabasco sauce. That record didn’t last long, with the Infinity Chilli, the Naga Viper Chilli and then the Trinidad Scorpion chilli all taking the crown. At the moment, the Carolina Reaper is the hottest chilli ever grown, coming in at 1.6 million points on the Scoville Scale. You’re advised to wear gloves when handling it. All of the above, it would appear, are thriving in our polytunnels. My anonymous gardening friend handed me a sandwich bag filled with some dried Carolina Reaper, no bigger than my thumb, as a gift, telling me that was a lifetime supply. I’m keeping it in my shed because I’m a little scared about having it in the house and I’ve not built up the courage to try it in a recipe yet. On Youtube there are teenagers who post videos where they start off eating a whole Carolina Reaper for a dare – they inevitably end the video screaming, usually explaining to a bemused paramedic why growing your channel subscriber base is more important that your health. I’ve learned a lot at the Community Garden this year, but never did I think I’d learn how to weaponise fruit. thought it was really magical to get to go through the canal lock in between the Kelpies heads – so that’s something else ticked of my list of life experiences. Re-union Cruises are the company who organise the events and we’ve done a couple of different things with them – their attention to detail and all round service is great and if you’re still hunting for a last minute Christmas present, check out their website and see what’s coming up in 2017.