The modern Mexican cooking depends upon beans and corn as their basic staples, along with both the old and new world cuisines. Home gardeners grow corn, beans, tomatoes, onions, sweet peppers, and squash. The Big Three crops are tomatillos, chili peppers, and cilantro, so if you are a gardener and want to capture the authentic 'South of the Border' taste, these three crops you should grow.
Tomatillos are easy to grow. These plants do not mind the heat and humidity, so you need to wait until the weather is warm and stable. The soil where you are going to plant tomatillos needs to be especially fertile, but heavy, poorly drained soils has to have sand and a bit of organic matter added to it. The seeds need to be planted several seeds in hills that are planted about 16 inches apart. Now, when the seedlings have two pairs of true leaves, you need to thin them to one per hill. If you are watering your chile peppers, then you need to water your tomatillos. It is according to how your weather is, they should begin to bear in a couple of months, and they will keep producing until frost. The fruits may drop off of the plant by themselves, and they can be left to partially-ripen. Tomatillos can be used from the time the husk open, until they have a pale golden tinge. Under ripe tomatillos is better than the overripe ones for most purposes.
The best way to keep the tomatillos is by removing the husk, along with the sticky sap that coats the surface of the fruit. You need to wash off all of the sap and then dry the fruit with a kitchen towel. You need to placed them in a plastic bag and put them in the refrigerator and they will stay good for more than a week in a refrigerator. They also can be canned like tomatoes and you do not need to peel the tomatillos.
Chile peppers comes in many different sizes and shades, but they are classified into just a few v groups. Poblano peppers are conical in shape and they grow big like a bell pepper. They have a dark, green, glossy, skins that sometimes turn red if you have a long and warm season. Harvested when ripe and dried until leathery, the poblano becomes an ancho, the chocolate brown chile which is used for most of the commercial, 'chile powder'. Pasilla is the dried, red-ripe form of an elongate, and yellow-green chile is chilaca. They are sold canned, labeled as 'green chiles'. They are long and pointed that looks like a sweet banana pepper, but bigger when mature.
Both poblano and Anaheim chiles are mildly hot. Smaller chile varieties are much hotter, and the heat increasing as the size decreases. The largest and the mildest of these is, jalapeno which is an elongate, blunt tipped shiny green pepper which grows up to 4 inches long. Jalapeno turns cherry red when it gets ripe, and they are hot at any time of development. Jalapinos are sometimes stuffed with chesse, breaded and deep-fried. They are done in a pickled form which are both whole and sliced. Serrano is a fiendishly hot little pepper which grows to the length of 2 inches. Serrano grows to tapers at both ends with a fatter middle.. The ones that grows to a length of one inch which is called 'bird peppers', and they are eye-watering hot and they are dried and used either in whole or powered form.
All types of chile peppers are grown in the same way. The soil needs to be organically rich, but not too fertile. If you over fertilize you will have less fruits. They need a long, warm, dry growing season to mature properly. You will have to start early, if you are not going to use plants, because some of these varieties can take a month just to germinate. Start your peppers in a 36 cell trays and the soil temperature has to be above 75 degree F. Put one seed in each cell, covering with about a quarter inch of growing mix. You need to keep it barely moist until the seedlings emerge. If the temperature as cool and the soil has excess moisture, it will lead to poor germination or death of young seedlings. When you get two pairs of true leaves have formed, transplant the seedlings to small pots. Keep them warm, because the nighttime temperature should not be below 65 degrees F, and plants should be wintered with warm water. Put them in large container if you can not get them in a garden. If you have setbacks during the early growth stages this will hinder the harvest. Never allow plants to wilt.
Chile peppers planting area needs to be fertilized with cottonseed and bone meal at transplant time. Sprinkle a tablespoon of each into the bottom of the planting hole, cover with a little soil and then put the plants in place. The holes needs to be space eighteen inches apart. You will need to stake them for later when the fruit set. Peppers bears so much fruit that they can break due to the weight of the peppers. Always feed your peppers with a liquid fertilizer, such as compost tea, every two weeks until flower buds appear.
These peppers are not warm weather plants and if the night temperatures exceeds eighty degrees F then the blossoms will drop off. So the plantings will do real good if the night temperatures do not drop below 65 degrees F.
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