My husband and I used to have a large vegetable garden. We would grow a wide assortment of vegetables as well as tomatoes. We would have plenty of vegetables to eat fresh and also we would freeze green beans, corn and peas. I would can tomatoes, dill pickles and a variety of jelly and jam. One year my sister-in-law gave me a salsa recipe that was suppose to be very good.

That year I planted celery, green bell peppers and one jalapeño pepper plant so that I would all the ingredients from the garden.
We had never tried to raise peppers before. I did not think we had a long enough growing season, but we soon found out that we did. We planted eight of the bell pepper plant. They came in four packs so we bought two packs. We put them out into the garden at the very end of May. By the middle of August we had so many bell peppers that we did not know what to do with them.

I went to look at the jalapeño pepper plant. There were over a dozen peppers hanging on the plant and there were still blooms to open. I looked up the salsa recipe that my sister-in-law gave me. The recipe made eight pint jars of salsa and the recipe called for two jalapeno peppers. I realized that we would not have had to plant the pepper plant we could have purchased two jalapeños.
We decided that we would put the peppers into the dill pickles we were going to make. I had never worked with jalapeno peppers before and did not realize that the oil from the peppers will burn your skin. By the time I was done cleaning and cutting the peppers the tips of my fingers were all red and they burned. I ran them under cold water and tried rubbing some ointment on them. The burn improved a little bit. I looked up peppers in a canning book. When I got to the section the title read in large bold letters, do not handle peppers with bare skin. When my husband came home from work I showed him the tips of my fingers as well as the caution sign. I told him that I could not believe that we were going to ingest a food that you are warned not to touch with your bare skin.

The salsa did turn out to be very good. We have extra tomatoes and peppers so we canned another double batch. We gave jars of the salsa as gifts and also used it as a condiment at home. Two peppers per batch was plenty of heat. The next year we did not plant the jalapeño pepper plant, borrowed two from the neighbor’s plant.