Spanish Tapas at Melbourne Park

Anyone who has travelled to Spain, or even had tapas at a Spanish bar or restaurant is likely to be au fait with pimentos de Padrón, or more commonly to you and I, Padron Peppers.



They are a variety of peppers which originate in Galicia, Spain and grow to about 2 inches, 5 cms long, green in colour but if left to mature beyond this size can turn red.

The peppers are unusual in the fact they are generally mild, but a small proportion, 1 in 10 are particularly hot, making your starter a culinary roulette.



The peppers are customarily fried in olive oil, scorched and sprinkled with course salt and served as tapas.

They have proved relatively straight forward to grow, propagating at 20 degrees and then re potting the plants twice before placing in more significant pots in the poly tunnel.

Seeds are available from various sources, and from an initial 6 seeds sewn we have 5 plants producing these tasty green morsels.



These are not the only different chilli varieties we are growing this year, and are also trying Aji lemon chilli's (hot), large red cherry - image below -(mild), Twilight (hot,- image above), together with Jalapeno's which we were successful with last year.



If anyone is interested to try these peppers (subject to availability) please contact Ray or Karen for further information. Part of the objectives for Project 63 was not only to provide local charity with produce, but also to experiment with items which may not usually be grown or considered by plotholders, and this easy to grow, tasty pepper we believe falls into this bracket. We hope we can encourage fellow plot holders to grow them. Punnets of Padron Peppers can also be purchased from certain supermarket chains very reasonably too.