Continue reading »]]> Loads of reports recently on who has grown the latest hottest naga all over the the internet. I find that there is always lots written on how the chilli was grown and such but very little on the taste. Is this because the taste is unimportant, heat is king, or is it maybe super hot chillies don’t actually taste very nice. We grow a lot of Naga Morish and Bhut Jolokia and periodically during the season I taste them to see how the heat is developing. Young chilli pods have very little heat, almost nothing but what they do have is bucketfuls of flavour. As the chilli matures so the heat develops until they are fully ripe and the tasting experience is to do more with pain then taste. I think the Naga is a lovely tasting chilli but the flavour is largely forgotten as the body deals with the mouth of pain. As an ingredient in cooking I think the Naga is great and can transform a dish, Naga blended in vinegar, not so nice.

Continue reading »]]> After a couple of weeks of development work to make our website more efficient and user friendly, and a push to add more content we have jumped up the Alex  page ranking, currently sitting at 17,400 for the UK. This is an amazing and welcome climb, and with lots more ideas to develop and deploy we should carry on climbing up the ladder. The online magazine for chili lovers,  The Chile Foundry have us at the top of their ‘Top  10 Websites’  list  this week when we where  21,419 so even in the last week we have moved up quite a bit. Thanks to everybody who visits our site.

Continue reading »]]> Well, on Wednesday night the temperature went down to minus 5, effectively putting and end to our growing season. We fleeced the crop but the chilly plants just do not like cold nights. We have heaters running for background heat but it is not economical to keep them going all winter so we let the plants die back and replant each year.

Continue reading »]]> The name  Dry River Chillies came from various visit to West Dean Chilli Festival. The river Lavent flows through the grounds but dries up in the summer as it is a winterborne stream. When our eldest daughter was very young we would lay in the dried up river bed pretending to be fish. One year I said to my daughter  “do you want to go to the chilli festival”  to which she replied “dry river fishies”, I thought she said chillies but the name was born.

Thank you for looking at our blog, this is where we are going to put all our current news and thoughts. We have had a fantastic 2010, we have been very busy from the start, first with seedlings for postal orders, then our nursery stock, planted the crop then a full summer of festivals and shows. We are now just finishing cropping, trying to time a big pick just before the hard frosts hit the south of England.