Creek Running North

A couple of serranos in the herb garden, along with this chile de arbol, grow within a theoretically Thistle-proof fence. A thai chile and several of an unknown variety sold as “relleno chiles” at the hardware store are in the raised beds. I have three poblanos in pots still, waiting for me to fill the rest of the raised beds with new soil. In the kitchen, a bag of dried cascabels wait for me to open them up, start their seeds. Cascabel chile plants can reach a meter in height, so placement is best done after some consideration.

I love cascabels in salsa. Dry them, brown them on a hot comal, then grind them up with onion and fresh tomato and a pinch of salt.

Chiles are semihardy here. I’ve had them overwinter two years out of three, especially the plants with small hot fruit. When Nakano Nursery in Oakland was still open, and selling the obscure land races of chiles Mr. Nakano had grown from seed, I bought a black-fruited variety that was almost habañero hot, and it bore me fruit for three years. The pepper is gone now, and so is the nursery. I was writing my garden column in the Times when I was there last, and was so intrigued by the stories Nakano told me that I asked if I could write about his nursery. He shrugged. “We don’t really need any more customers.” He was in his seventies then, I think, fit, lucid, shifting with ease from talking about sprouting pepper seed to talking about losing the larger property they’d had across the street when they were interned.

120,000 stories like that, or thereabouts, most of them no longer remembered now.

The hot in chiles comes from capsaicin — a chemical structurally related to vanillin — which is a strong irritant to most mammals. Birds can eat the stuff with impunity. Red fruit is attractive to birds, and the chiltepin, thought to be the ancestor of many pepper varieties, is dispersed so readily by birds that it’s often called the “bird pepper.” Mammals, who would likely chew up the seeds if they ate the fruit, are deterred by the capsaicin and leave chiltepins alone. The chile’s heat is a survival strategy, a subtle and piquant defense, a way of enduring hardship without hardening one’s self.