Design

I do wish I could buy colorful peppers (fresh or frozen) grown nearby. My post yesterday presented the conundrum . Hopefully, we'll be able to crank up the cooperative systems that will allow local growers to preserve (freeze) their peppers at competitive prices, so we'll be able to buy them in the off-season, as well as enjoying them in our growing period. It's a complicated system. Obviously, it's still cheaper for a small Pennsylvania-based company Village Grown Organics to contract-grow organic peppers in China. Oil is still cheap enough and container ship and truck transport is efficient, so a small company's product can appear in a local Southeastern U.S. grocery store. That's essentially nuts as far as a real ecological footprint is concerned. Village Grown Organics launched their product line within the last year. Here's a trade show video that popped up in a Google search. I have zero connection with this company. I was impressed with th...

Colorful peppers are a good thing; they're full of nutrients and low in calories, in addition to being tasty. The hothouse peppers available in the supermarket from the Netherlands, Canada, and Mexico are tasty, but bear a burden of energy costs, food miles, etc. Balancing nutrition and one's ecological footprint isn't always easy. In our warm summer climate, we can grow lots of nice peppers, spicy anchos and poblanos, as well as mild Italian roasting peppers, pimentos, and 'pizza' peppers. What we (at least I) can't grow well is large, juicy 'bell' peppers, whether green, red, orange, or yellow. This time of year, my home-grown frozen peppers add a nice kick to sauces and stir-fries, but they're pretty meager compared to what's available in the market. These seem to be a product of pampered greenhouses, kept at optimal temperatures, with abundant moisture and nutrients through the growing season. So I was interested to see frozen organic pe...