The Story of the Mathania Chile

The Beet: A Podcast For Plant Lovers

Epic Gardening

Home & Garden, Education, Leisure, How To

4.8 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 11 September 2022

⏱️ 11 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A chile once thought to be lost to the sands of time, Adam discovered on his travels. Connect With Adam Alexander: Adam Alexander is The Seed Detective. His passion for vegetables was ignited when he tasted an unusual sweet pepper with a fiery heart while on a filmmaking project in Ukraine. Smitten by its flavor, Adam began to seek out local growers of endangered heritage and heirloom varieties in a mission to bring home seeds to grow, share, and return so that he could enjoy their delicious taste―and save them from being lost forever. The Seed Detective Shop the Store As an exclusive for listeners, use code EPICPODCAST for 5% off your entire first order on our store, featuring our flagship Birdies Raised Beds. These are the original metal raised beds, lasting up to 5-10x longer than wooden beds, are ethically made in Australia, and have a customizable modular design. Shop now and get 5% off your first order. Get Our Books Looking for a beginner's guide to growing food in small spaces? Kevin’s book, Field Guide to Urban Gardening, explains the core, essential information that you'll need to grow plants, no matter where you live! He also wrote Grow Bag Gardening to provide you with specialized knowledge that can bring you success when growing in fabric pots. Order signed copies of Kevin’s books, plus more of his favorite titles in our store. More Resources Looking for more information? Follow us: Our Blog YouTube (Including our Epic Homesteading and Jacques in the Garden channels) Instagram (Including Epic Homesteading, Jacques, and Chris) TikTok Facebook Facebook Group Discord Server Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	If you are a pepper lover or a chili lover, I certainly have always been, but in the
0:18.5	last two years I have really expanded my pepper growing to 45, 60 varieties on some
0:23.9	years.
0:24.9	So it's gotten a little wild, but there is a pepper I've never grown.
0:28.1	There's many peppers I've never grown.
0:29.6	We have Adam Alexander back on the show everyone, the seed detective.
0:33.8	We have a story, Adam, from you about the Metania chili.
0:37.6	Well, yeah, thanks for asking.
0:41.6	I mean, I'm like you, I'm a bit of a chili now.
0:44.3	I don't grow 60 varieties a year because I'm growing varieties to save seeds and
0:51.1	chilies, although they're so fertile, they do cross, so I tend to grow maybe 5 or 6
0:59.0	varieties and keep them in isolation, so that they remain true.
1:05.0	But the interesting thing that one of the things, let's put it this way, one of the things
1:11.7	that sort of gets me out of bed in the morning is the desire to secure rare and endangered
1:20.5	varieties, and because the truth is, and I've seen it in places like Myanmar with farmers
1:28.6	switching their crops, is that if you've been growing a local variety in your family for
1:34.2	generations and you stop growing it because you're buying a packet of a modern cultivar
1:40.0	for, often for very sound reasons, that variety you've been growing yourself is lost and
1:46.8	it's lost forever.
1:48.8	So it's really important to try and secure them, and I was in Rajasthan in northwest India
1:58.4	in 2019, and Rajasthan is, it has the tar desert, it's hyper arid, it's a dry, dry place
2:09.0	most of the year, but it has an amazing food culture and the Indians are very, very proud
	...

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