It’s wild to admit it but it’s our 10 year anniversary of growing Espelette chiles and making Piment d’Ville here in Boonville!
Help us celebrate 10 years of growing chiles!
Boonville Barn Collective may only be 1.5 years old, but Nacho and I started making Piment d’Ville together 10 years ago. We started small in 2012 with 50 seeds that grew into 50 plants that produced a few pounds of Piment d’Ville chile powder. Martin joined the team 5 years ago and since then, we’ve had years where we grew over 65,000 Espelette chile plants! Gideon is entering his 2nd growing season and 3rd harvest year here in Boonville and has helped us diversify - we’ve got 12 different varieties in the ground this year!
Our 2021 crop of chiles are all in the ground!
It took us 3 and a half days to get about 50,000 chiles planted - not bad at all!
Planting each chile is a 3 person job: One person carries a flat of chile starts while another uses this jab-type planter to make a hole in the prepared bed. A chile start gets dropped down the chute and we move on to the next plant! The 3rd person follows behind, covering the hole with soil to ensure that water from our drip irrigation doesn’t evaporate out and to provide support.
We use the same jab planter to direct seed all of our heirloom beans and popcorn. It's an incredibly helpful tool that requires some finesse to really get the rhythm down and may leave your hands a bit blistered and your arm muscles pretty sore!
Have you tried our new marmalade and strawberry preserves?
Basically, both are just really delicious and we want you to enjoy them while we have em! The Strawberry and Piment d’Ville preserves is rich and luscious while the Citrus and Chile marmalade has a deep citrus flavor with lingering heat. Both would be perfect on a summer cheese board, spooned into a simple cake, or eaten on toast!
Truly, Thanks.
Whether you’ve been here for the ride for the past 10 years or are a new fan, we’re so glad you are a part of the Boonville Barn Collective community. We can’t wait to see what the next 10 bring for our farm and we look forward to hearing what you think along the way.
It’s time for us to get back in the field and make sure the crows aren’t pulling our chiles out of the ground (yes, that did happen this week) and that the gophers aren’t breaking our irrigation system (yes, that also happened too). We’ll be posting some throwback photos of our past 10 years on Instagram this month so make sure to follow us @boonvillebarn!
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