"Flame Thrower" Habanero Hot Sauce (and chickens)

In the fall, I like to use up the last of my hot peppers and make a hot sauce to give as gifts.  This year our chocolate habanero plant was extremely prolific and since that fruity, hot, hot pepper is one of my favorites, habanero hot sauce was on the menu.  Hot peppers will stay fresh for awhile if you keep them bagged in the fridge.  I didn't exactly follow a recipe for this batch, but I did pH test it, and it is vinegar based with a pH of around 3.7 so it should keep well in the fridge for quite awhile. My previous vinegar sauces were fine for over a year.  I ordered the bottles from Fillmore Container...website can be found here.

I used roughly:

big bag of carrots

1 quart of canned whole tomatoes

onions, a lot (I cant remember how many!  Maybe 10 or so?)

50 habaneros

3 c vinegar

1 c lime juice

1.5 c water

salt to taste

Chop onions and carrots and cook in oil until tender. Add tomatoes and simmer.  Make a paste with habaneros in food processor with some liquid.  Combine everything except lime juice.  Blend well with immersion blender.  Heat through and barely simmer for 20 minutes.  Add lime juice, put through a food mill, and bottle.  

Habanero Hot Sauce

Fancy "taped on" label

In other news the chickens are getting into the holiday spirit by kicking around some evergreen bough trimmings we picked up from a christmas tree seller.  These are woody and will not be breaking down anytime soon but they are a nice bulky, airy bottom to this giant compost pile I'm building for chicken winter entertainment and soil conservation.

Compost Beginnings

Getting into the Holiday Spirit with some evergreen boughs

Chickens Make Compost

Chickens love to scratch.  Therefore chickens are the perfect source of easy compost because they can take organic matter and veggie scraps and shred and turn them and poop on them until they are compost.  When I first read about this idea of putting egg-laying chickens to work for the garden in Harvey Ussery's The Small Scale Poultry Flock, a lightbulb went off.  Wow!  This is great!  Chickens can turn large amounts of coarse dead matter from the garden into compost.  But the benefits don't stop there!  The chickens are kept interested digging, their run space is covered with shredded organic matter so it doesn't get muddy or eroded, and the gardener gets out of compost-turning-duty.  PERFECT!

While figuring out exactly where to place the compost piles in the chickens' habitat is a work in process...I must say I am very impressed with their work over the past 2 years.  And it really does keep them entertained.  A chicken that cannot scratch is a bored and sad chicken.  And as compost starts to get going and worms and bugs start hanging out in it....they just have a field day shredding and turning that compost, in search of an elusive earthworm.  

Many folks have figured out a system that works for them, and many more seem in the experimental phase like me.  Here's a fun gravity based composting run .....  Milkwood Gravity Run.  The key of all of them seems pretty simple...add organic matter and let them go to town!

Scritch Scritch, Scratch Scratch

"C'mon Girls...work it!  Move those legs!"

1 season's worth of organic matter turned to compost

Chickens can handle even tough stalk vegetable plants like brussle sprouts and tomato vines.  The compost pictured above once included over 200 tomato vines!  When the compost looks done, I let it age by building a new pile somewhere else.  The chickens ignore the old finished compost for the newer stuff, especially if there are some veggie scraps thrown in.  They seem partial to kale but I know they miss the summer tomatoes.  We would throw them all the cracked fruit and little mini chicken riots would break out, chasing whoever had the tomato in her mouth.  

Compost dug out and ready for bed application

Deep leaf chicken bedding composting nicely...it's warm!

If you need to keep things tidier than just piling up dead plants in your yard, there are ways of keeping the compost process contained with a simple bin in the chicken yard...made out of pallets or straw bales perhaps.  Just as long as the chickens can access it, they are good to go to work for you.  

Pallet Compost Bin

We built this 3 bay pallet compost pallet bin a year ago.  We used the far right bin to compost in for a year.  The middle bin is for storing higher carbon organic matter til needed (straw, leaves, weeds).  The far right bin now has a year's worth of compost in it, and we will leave it to age while we add to the far left bin.

Our 3 bay compost bin system

Lid only added when heavy rains are raining.  Compost needs a lot of water, so normally keep it uncovered.

Burlap keeps the contents of each bin in but allows airflow

A "sponge" of airy organic matter at the bottom of the compost prevents any leaching

Middle bin is "browns" storage:  leaves, leaf mulch, straw or weeds to add to the piles

compost!

Worms Finished with Business, Desire New Home.

After several months, the red worms that now reside in their bin in the basement have tired of their surroundings and munched up all of the newspaper strips and vegetable scraps they could. So, I spread their "product" out on a tarp in little piles in the sun and they dove to the bottom and formed worm balls. This made it easier to sort them out and put them into the old bin that had been refreshed with new newspapers. The castings will now go back to the garden as fertilizer for the squash, tomatos, peppers and eggplants. Good timing since they are hungry right about now.

Keeping Compost Damp with Carpet.

I know.....this is really exciting news. It seems to really work! Put some remnants on top of the pile so you don't have to water it quite as much.

Worm Party

Do you wish that red worms would get busy under your sink in a plastic bin and turn your kitchen scraps into rich castings that your plants will love dearly? I did, and I found a simple way to make one in the book The Urban Homestead (see On The Back Porch posting). It's pretty easy, requiring only a plastic bin or two with lids, a drill, a pound of red worms, and shredded newspaper, a handful of soil for grit, and a pound of fruit and vegetable scraps a week. Drill air holes in the bin (top, bottom, and sides). Add the newspaper (dampened) and worms and leave them alone for a week, then start adding scraps. Keep everything damp but not wet and bury the scraps in a different location in the bin each week. After a couple months, you have the finished product. Separate the worms from the worm castings (there are a few ways to do this) and then use the castings as fertilizer. Add a bit to the soil around your plants, or soak some in water (1 part castings to 3 parts water) for 24 hours and water your plants with it. They will love you for it.