Out of the soil the buds come, The silent detonations Of power wielded without sin RS Thomas, 'The Garden' 16th March I have a problem...

I picked up a few sauces from Pembrokeshire Chilli Farm the other day. They seem to be a pretty unfussy kind of company - the designs are...

Nope. Unless there’s a use in cooking this one’s not for me. Primarily vinegar and sugar, nevertheless the overwhelming flavour is the...

Okay, I don’t understand Singularity’s rating system. The 7-Pot was a 4 out of 5 in their heat rating and this is just one point down - a...

You can’t write about gloomy poets without mentioning Thomas Hardy. He is reliably gloomy on most subjects, so when he turns to...

Ah, this is good. You can smell the hot peppers as soon as you open the bottle - a sharpness heightened by the acid of the pineapple....

The name means 'hot sauce' in Cornish. I like the name more than the sauce, which tastes medicinal to me. I keep returning to it in the...

2nd March. They’re up! (Or some of them are.) I love the ways chilli seedlings hatch. It’s like very slow motion of someone rising from...

This is a serious sauce, and probably the best packaging I’ve seen so far. The hot pink and the shimmery silver foiling are immediately...

It’s amazing how gloomy poems about greenhouses have been. Look at Maeterlinck (1862-1949). He was never especially cheery, but he wrote...

Singularity is a company from Aberdeen with a really interesting range of sauces. I’ve picked up a handful and want to start with the...

21st February. If this house had a genius loci it would be a toad. Taking the dog out late at night I often came across this toad around...

Ah okay, this is much softer than the last Bumblebee Cottage sauce. Only three chillies out of five on this one. Rusty orange in colour...

16th February It’s felt like Spring today. A few minutes of sunshine brought raggedy bumblebees out to the heather and a thick smog of...

Quite a pale sauce and apparently made from cayennes, so there’s none of the posturing of some of the other sauces that list their...

I love this. In appearance it is smooth, thick and bright yellow. It swells sweet and the two key ingredients are immediately clear -...

4th February. I’m sowing the Rocoto seeds first. They want a longer growing season so I thought I’d give them a week or two’s head start....

I found this one in our local grocers, up at the Beacon in Bodmin. It’s made nearby, at Delabole (where the poet Philip Gross was born)....

The label scares me. It markets itself as a super-hot hot sauce and the Ghost Ship name is not just a nod to the HMS Eurydice wrecked off...

In 2024 I’ll be planting four varieties: Ring O’ Fire (capsicum annuum), Cayennetta (capsicum annuum), Orange habanero (capsicum...