Updates

    The Story Behind Manzanilla

    by Amrit Madhoo

    By now you have probably seen our newest product launch – Manzanilla Tropical Chilli Jam. Weird name, you might think. Well, Manzanilla is the name of Amrit’s local childhood beach in Trinidad. A stunning stretch of white sand, idyllic palm trees and bright blue skies. Weekends were passed here with family and friends, “liming” (i.e. having a good time) and evenings spent alongside huge leatherback turtles lay their eggs on the shore, watched over lovingly by the locals. It was this feeling of relaxation, joy and fun that Amrit wanted to bring to the Chilli Farm with his new creation. A jam that can enliven any meal, be it savoury or sweet. Something that can be dolloped liberally, and licked off the spoon as a treat. Manzanilla beach is also part and parcel of Amrit’s family’s Carnival tradition. After partying for often a few days straight, the family would reconvene at Manzanilla beach for some R&R and usually a BBQ. It’s this party spirit we wanted to invoke with our colourful masquerade packaging design. Since the moment we arrived at the Chilli Farm, we knew we wanted to add a sweet preserve to our range, and we are delighted that Manzanilla has achieved that – its such a fantastically versatile jam – as you’ll know if you’ve seen us testing it out with ice cream over on our YouTube channel!!! But it goes equally as a baste on cocktail sausages, a marinade for halloumi (see our recipes page) or even on granola and yogurt for breakfast! We’re so happy that Manzanilla Tropical Chilli Jam is fast becoming a firm favourite among Chilli Farm fans, and can’t wait to see the creative combinations that you continue to come up with!

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    The Story Behind Manzanilla

    Getting Christmas-ready at SDCF!

    by Amrit Madhoo

    You might be thinking, September’s a bit early to be talking about Christmas….! Well, Christmas starts early here at SDCF….!  Usually, the first thing we start planning around Christmas is which Christmas Markets we plan to attend. Bookings open early in the year – anywhere from February to June – and it’s a COMPETITIVE field! The most popular Christmas Markets around the UK are massively oversubscribed, which means a huge amount of work has to go into our applications to ensure we stand out in a crowded marketplace! This year, we were delighted to be accepted into Exeter, Bath, AND Cardiff Christmas Markets! We’re super excited (and a tad nervous!) to be at THREE markets this winter - something we’ve never attempted before! Once we know which markets we’re going to be at, we can start forecasting the volume of sauces, jams and chocolates the team need to produce. This can’t start too early in the year as we need to be conscious of product shelf life – but it all needs to be fitted into the kitchen and chocolate room schedules of Dan and Elsa over the course of the second half of the year. Something else festive that starts early on, is the research and development of any special Christmas product lines.   For Christmas 2024, we introduced our Winter Spice Drinking Chocolate – this was a HUGE success and as a result we have re-released it for Christmas 2025. We have one other special chocolatey Christmas gift for your stockings this Christmas – and all will be revealed in the coming weeks! Suffice to say though, that development of this new product started on Valentine’s Day! (No complaints from the team though who have been diligently taste-testing the various trials and iterations we have come up with over the year!) Christmas is a time for gifts, and so all our chilli themed gift sets fly out the door during November and December. BUT – these are all assembled by hand! So, that means all hands on deck with a production line, building gift boxes and popping our bestselling jams and sauces into their cozy packaging, ready to go under the tree…. Seed collection has also been completed by around early November, and gardeners up and down the country turn towards the new year and planning their allotments/gardens/pots! So, that means seeds need to be READY to go! Again, we hand pick and pack our seeds, to ensure only the best quality make it into our seed packs. This is painstaking work for the team who count every last one.   Christmas is a crazy time of year at the Farm, but we wouldn’t have it any other way!

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    Getting Christmas-ready at SDCF!

    Creating a sauce collab with a Global Icon!

    by Amrit Madhoo

    The Tango team were looking for a partner to collaborate on a special spicy sauce for students to dip their fried chicken strips! (In fact this was a 3-way collab with Nabzy’s chicken shops!) So, naturally, they thought of us at South Devon Chilli Farm, the home of British chillies! So, we rolled up our sleeves, put on our lab coats and set out to create something as bold, as punchy, and as unapologetically Tango as the drinks themselves.   The Orange Chilli Sauce. Yes, you read that right. Orange. Chilli. Sauce. And trust us—its awesome.   But developing a sauce worthy of the Tango name isn’t just a case of tossing some oranges and chillies into a blender and hoping for the best. Oh no. This was a flavour quest. A spicy, citrusy, trial-and-error-laden journey with more twists than a Tango bottle cap. It started small. Tiny batches—each with the potential to be either a taste revolution or a fiery disaster. One version was too tame (where’s the spice?). Another, too aggressive (fire brigade, anyone?). The real trick? Keeping that signature Tango tang, while layering in just the right amount of heat. So we did what all great sauce-sorcerers do: we sent out samples, gathered feedback, and tweaked like mad scientists. A little less vinegar. A little more citrus. Dial the chilli back. Now crank it up again. It was a flavour balancing act that would’ve made a trapeze artist sweat.   Eventually, we nailed it. That “eureka” moment when the team simultaneously high-fives and the taste-testers’ eyes light up! That’s when you know: it’s ready.   Then it was down to work, bottling hundreds of these fiery orange beauties, destined to land on shelves, in takeaways and (most importantly) on your plates. Partnering with Tango wasn’t just exciting—it was downright electric. Few brands have a flavour profile bold enough to inspire a whole new sauce, and even fewer have the fizz and flair to make it fly!   Stay saucy, The Flavour Freak Behind the Bottle (aka Dan the Chef!)  

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    Creating a sauce collab with a Global Icon!

    Origins of the Trinidad Moruga Scorpion

    by Amrit Madhoo

    The Scorpion chilli pepper (Capsicum chinense) with its various manifestations including the Trinidad Moruga Scorpion, Trinidad Scorpion and the Butch T Scorpion to name a few, is perhaps the one chilli variety with the most mysterious origins. Over the years, many people have tried to untangle the history of the Scorpion pepper, but there still remains an air of mystery surrounding who actually bred the very first Scorpion pepper, and whether it started off as a Trinidad Scorpion or a Trinidad Moruga Scorpion. Since taking over the South Devon Chilli Farm, I have spent a lot of time trying to untangle this history, particularly from the perspective of the Trinidad Moruga Scorpion (as it is a name and a place very close to my heart). Despite having very similar names, this, and the Trinidad Scorpion, are two different cultivars. Note, I use the word ‘chilli’ and ‘pepper’ interchangeably since this is how we would use them in Trinidad, with more emphasis on ‘pepper’. There have been a few attempts to catalogue the Scorpion’s history, perhaps the most thorough documentation to date has been done by The League of Fire and published in their article “The Trinidad, The Moruga & The Scorpion” (https://leagueoffire.com/the-trinidad-the-moruga-the-scorpion/). Their article goes into a lot of detail such as comparing fruit morphology, and they point out many of the issues with the timeline surrounding the Scorpion pepper and which version came first. This blog isn’t an attempt to critique their article and conclusions – it is simply another take based on my own research. But I would urge anyone interested in knowing the history of these peppers to read their article as well, since they present a lot of information that would otherwise be disparate and scattered which further showcases how unclear the true origins of the peppers are. With all of this controversy, I decided to make a pilgrimage to Moruga, Trinidad, to try and find some clarity. So, in November 2024, I travelled back to Trinidad and enlisted the help of my family who still live in Moruga to track down the person who they believe is the original creator of the Moruga Scorpion. Since gaining the title of the hottest chilli in the world in 2012, there has been virtually no mention in the media about the creator of the original Moruga Scorpion. The only reference I can find is a Wikipedia article (Figure 1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinidad_Moruga_scorpion) which claims that a person by the name of Wahid Ogeer of Trinidad is the creator of the yellow cultivar of the Trinidad Moruga Scorpion. This mention of ‘yellow cultivar’ is important, since the consensus amongst the chilli growing community is that the original Trinidad Moruga Scorpion was red. Indeed, many of the super-hot chillies started off as red cultivars and have subsequently been selected for different colour phenotypes. So, who created the original red Trinidad Moruga Scorpion? In my opinion, the article almost implies that Mr. Ogeer is the creator of the original Moruga Scorpion and that it happened to be yellow. This inconsistency in the language used in the Wikipedia article isn’t just an issue of semantics, since botanically any subsequent phenotypes from later generations of cross breeding would naturally be called a ‘cultivar.’ Add to this the fact that the Wikipedia article also has a picture of the archetypal red Moruga Scorpion juxtaposed against the author’s claims that Mr Ogeer created it. Given the prominence of the Scorpion peppers globally, one would expect there to be more than just one or two cursory articles in the Trinidad Guardian about the creator of these infamous peppers. Was it just poor journalism at the time to have missed this opportunity to give proper recognition to a local who created something that became world famous? Or could it be that the editors at the time were just as confused as we are today? I can’t get hold of the original Trinidad Guardian article, but there has been later references by the newspaper of that original photo of Mr Ogeer (https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10153406871248067&id=78081948066&set=a.87957863066).  I have always been skeptical about whether Wahid Ogeer was the creator of the original red Trinidad Moruga Scorpion. According to the very sparse public information, Mr Wahid operates a farm in Chickland Caparo Road in Freeport (according to articles published in the Trinidad and Tobago Guardian around the time when the Scorpion pepper started gaining notoriety in the media). Chickland, Freeport is in a completely different part of the country and is not anywhere near the village of Moruga (Figure 2). Figure 1. Wikipedia article on the Trinidad Moruga Scorpion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinidad_Moruga_scorpion. [Accessed 12/02/2025]. Figure 2. Map of Trinidad showing the location of Chickland, Freeport and Moruga. Moruga is located on the southern coast of Trinidad and has a long history of farming. The most notable area is called ‘Lassavan’, a remote, rural area comprising many small farms (Figure 3) located east off the Moruga Road down La Fortune Trace (Figure 4). If you were to look for this Lassavan area on a map, you wouldn’t see many, if any at all mention of it. It seems to be a term that isn’t officially recognized. But locals know and use it to refer to this particular farming area in Moruga. Lassavan is well known amongst the locals to be the farming heartland of Moruga and has been this way for generations. Figure 3. Location of Lassavan, Moruga. Figure 4. Sign post at the junction of Moruga Road and La Fortune Trace. Luckily for me, I still have family connections in the area and some extended family and friends who still farm in the area. I was fortunate enough to meet one of the elders of the village, a gentleman who has been farming in Lassavan all his life. He preferred to remain unnamed, but without his help, I would not have been able to track down the person whom he believes to be the creator of the Trinidad Moruga Scorpion. After introducing myself and having a chat about my family origins and connections to the area, he agreed to escort us to the family home of local farmer Mr. Nigel Rooplal. Nigel was a humble farmer and was generous enough to spare some of his time to talk to me and introduce me to his family. According to Nigel, the true Trinidad Moruga Scorpion was created by himself and his brother, Russell Rooplal (a.k.a Rocky) in the years leading up to 2010. Sadly, Russell died a few years ago, and according to Nigel, he was the ‘brains behind their crossbreeding program’. Nigel was kind enough to give me a brief video interview (you can check out the video on our Youtube channel). He had just come home after a long day of farming, so I was delighted to be able to get a chance to speak to him. Nigel told the story of him and his brother setting out to create a very hot pepper. And that they managed to create the Moruga Scorpion by cross breeding a Trinidad 7-Pot and Congo Pepper. The commercial demand for super-hot chillies in Trinidad was driven by the local appetite for hotter and hotter chillies, especially for the popular street food called ‘doubles’. The 7-Pot has been known to be an extremely hot pepper for many years. The 7-Pot and the Congo Pepper are both landrace varieties (i.e., local traditional cultivars). The term ‘Congo Pepper’ is a name used locally in Trinidad to refer to red or yellow Habanero-type peppers. Nigel said that they released their Moruga Scorpion pepper in 2010. Nigel said that he and his brother didn’t get any help locally from the Ministry of Agriculture to formally recognize their achievement. And their names were never mentioned anywhere. It seems that they simply got forgotten about or maybe even intentionally left out of the story of this infamous pepper. Nigel also told me that over the last few years, and even as recently as a few weeks prior to my trip, he had another person visit him in Lassavan from England trying to track down the origins of the Trinidad Moruga Scorpion pepper. It just shows that there are people out there, like me, who aren’t convinced by the sparsely documented history of this infamous pepper. To add a bit more complication to this Scorpion saga, according to an article published in June 2011 in UWI Today (https://sta.uwi.edu/uwitoday/archive/june_2011/article1.asp), the editor, Vaneisa Baksh, talks about how Trinidad never got the necessary credit and recognition for the provenance of the controversial Butch T Scorpion which was crowned hottest chilli in the world in 2011, a year before the Trinidad Moruga Scorpion took the title. The order of words to describe this cultivar varies from author to author. It is worth mentioning this Trinidad Scorpion Butch T pepper (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinidad_Scorpion_Butch_T_pepper), since there are issues with the time line for the emergence of these cultivars as the League of Fire mentioned in their article. Interestingly, Vanesia mentions that ‘Scorpion’ peppers were being tested for their extreme heat levels as far back as 1998 when PhD researchers at the University of the West Indies were conducting research into the peppers and measuring their heat levels. According to Vanesia, Scorpion peppers were grown by a farmer (Lawrence Constantine) in Maracas in the north of Trinidad as far back as 1998 or even earlier. These were certainly not Moruga Scorpion peppers, but they were almost certainly some type of super-hot pepper that would be very similar to many Scorpions that have emerged since then. It is also unclear when the term ‘Scorpion’ was first used to describe these extremely hot peppers. The name is believed to have been introduced to describe the tail of the pepper which resembles the stinger of a scorpion. But no one knows who exactly coined the term ‘Scorpion.’ Since the Trinidad 7-Pot (a.k.a. 7-Pod) is a landrace variety widely grown in Trinidad for many years, it is quite possible that, Nigel and Russel through their cross-breeding efforts in Moruga intentionally struck upon a similarly hot variety to the ‘Scorpion’ peppers which were grown in the north of Trinidad by Mr. Constantine and tested by PhD researchers in the 1990s. And Nigel’s and Russel’s cultivar became the Moruga Scorpion due to their provenance in Lassavan, Moruga. While speaking to Nigel, he told me definitively that he and his brother chose the name Moruga Scorpion when they released the pepper. This would make sense etymologically. Without genetic testing, which is expensive, it is impossible to tell which variety/cultivar came first. And even if this was done, it probably wouldn’t shed any light on the people behind the crosses. It is a real shame that Nigel and Russell’s story has never been told more widely. When the director of the Chilli Pepper Institute at the New Mexico State University, Paul Bosland, and his team measured the Moruga Scorpion and declared it the hottest chilli in the world in 2012, I believe there should have been proper mention of these brothers from Moruga. Having met Nigel and the village elder and heard their humble story, it is my personal opinion that they are the true creators of the Moruga Scorpion. After all these years they have not had fame and fortune from it, so why create a story now about it and rely on unlikely visitors to try and tell their story? There has not been any contrived narrative or motivation to seek popularity on their part, which makes it even more convincing to me that Nigel and Russel should be credited for creating the Moruga Scorpion. I am grateful to have had the chance to meet Nigel and hear his side of the story. Figure 5. Amrit and Nigel, Nov. 2024.   Watch Amrit's video about his trip here. Watch the full interview with Nigel here.

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    Origins of the Trinidad Moruga Scorpion

    The long journey to RHS Gold!

    by Amrit Madhoo

    The event may have started on 8th May 2025, but preparations for RHS Malvern Spring Festival began long before this! In fact, myself, Jenny, Ben and the Horticulture Team first visited RHS Malvern for a tour and workshop for new exhibitors back in 2023! Through this event we met several inspiring RHS exhibitors, both old hands and newcomers, who all filled us with inspiration and drive to be part of the event as soon as we could. Jenny and I went back in 2024 so I could be part of a panel about nursery growing as well!  There are lots of logistics involved with RHS events (I’ll explain later), but we decided to ease ourselves in by exhibiting first at our local event, RHS Rosemoor, in 2023, and then a slightly bigger show, RHS Hyde Hall, in summer 2024. At both of these events we tried our hands at exhibit displays and were awarded with “5 Flower Gold” medals for our efforts. This was a big boost to the team to know that we were heading in the right direction to have an impact when we moved to the next step. Straight after RHS Hyde Hall in summer 2024, we decided as a team we would commit to RHS Malvern Spring Festival the following year. So, it was time to get planning! As part of the application process we could choose our stand layout, and having decided on a 3-tier “side pitch”, Jenny set to work designing a display layout to really showcase our plants. Since the show is in May and required large fruiting and flowering specimen plants to really make an impact, we decided to go for a Linley Exhibit entry, meaning the display has an educational aspect to it and isn’t required to replicate a garden setting. This would have been too difficult for us to create given we were having to force plants on approx. 6 months out of their normal season. Forcing on meant we needed to create artificial growing conditions for the plants – enter our new grow tent. This was installed in what used to be our shop café – a big hulking 3x2m black tent – I’m sure some of our customers over the winter probably thought we were growing something besides chillies in there!  The grow tent and equipment was a big investment for the farm, as well as the energy bills that it racked up over the winter period keeping the plants warm and well-lit. The grow tent performed well, though it was a hotbed for aphids at times, and given the heat and light in there it required regular watering by myself and the horticulture team. We pulled every plant out on a weekly basis to check it over, removing any stragglers as we went.  Having started with over 100 seedlings, we slowly whittled down to the final approx. 20 plants that were taken to the show. We tried our best to ensure that the plants we took represented a broad range of the species of the capsicum family, and were also reflected in the varieties we had for sale at the stand as well. The plants were in the grow tent until the end of March, when we were blessed with great weather and they joined their cousins in our nursery tunnels for their final few weeks before the show. With Izzi in charge of the nursery tunnels, she was tasked with sowing all the seeds required for our plant sales area, alongside all her other sowings for our own crops and online plant sales. Initially we had planned only to take seedling-size plants in plugs, to maximize the number of plants we could take in the trolley space available. However given the period of excellent spring weather we had, the plants grew a little too quickly! We were able to redirect manpower to get the larger plants potted on into 1 litre pots, and ended up taking a mix of both sizes. Next year we are reviewing our options in terms of pot sizes to see what is the most efficient. When it came to logistics, we decided that camping on site at the showground was the best option – it allowed us to be close to the display at all times (in case we were working late/starting early!), and was cost effective given the amount we had already invested in the growing equipment and energy to run it. Therefore, Phil and I got started gathering up our camping gear! We booked a Luton van for the beginning and end of the show dates; while our Chilli Van is great for moving sauce and chocolate stock around the country, it cannot fit our dutch trolleys inside it, nor does it have a ramp or a tail lift. Not to mention of course the fact that we have never transported such huge chilli plants before and had no idea the best way to do this without seeing branches snap off en route!   We ended up wrapping the plants with pallet wrap to keep them stable and contained, which worked very well as we had minimal damage sustained in transit. With everyone safely at the showground, the luton driver was sent back down the road to return the van to the hire depot. Amrit, Phil and Jenny could then get to work bringing the display to life! At Malvern, you have approximately 24 hours to do the majority of this job – so nerves were running high! Even more so, when we placed our first plant on the display stage to discover that the entire thing was erected at a wonky angle! A quick panicked word with the organisers saw the handymen dispatched and adding some boards to bolster the stage. We then cracked on, hoping that would be the last spanner in the works! We started by inspecting each specimen that we had brought, and roughly placing them to establish which shapes and colours worked best in which places. Once the layout was broadly decided, we combed over each plant with a water sprayer, pair of scissors and even tweezers(!) to ensure that it was looking its absolute best! Any dried or ripped leaves, dead flowers or bits of spider web were all removed, pots cleaned and polished, and discreet plant supports added to ensure no mid-show collapses! Phil spent several hours meticulously laying out the plant sale area with signage, pricing and the accoutrements such as plant feed, books and grow kits. Once the plants were preened, we turned our attention to the display signage. This is a key part of a Linley display as it has to be educational. We had prepared more boards than we thought we would need, just in case! So, on the day we only used around half of what we had – it was hard to whittle it down!  We settled on several signs detailing the history of chillies, a few about growing and pest management, and some about using and eating chillies. We had a couple of larger boards with our chilliometer and a capsicum family tree, as well as one for the middle of the stand with our company logo. These were all placed, along with several props we had decided on – some fresh and dry chilli fruits, some seeds and a leaf with dead aphids that had been predated by one of our natural pest predators under a microscope. We also added a slab of chilli chocolate (pretty hard to resist eating that!) and some Aztec-inspired cloths to set off the black stand and nod towards the birthplace of the original wild chillies. Once the display was finalized, Jenny left back to the farm (someone had to keep the crops going back home!) and Amrit and Phil had one further morning to keep preening and perfecting the display and sales area, ready for judging at 12 midday on day 2.  It was a long wait after judging to hear our results, which were announced early morning on day 3 (AKA public show opening day!) We were so happy that our hard work resulted in a gold medal, with perfect scores in all categories from the judges. They particularly loved the predated aphid leaf and information, as well as the historic information about how chillies made it from South America around the rest of the world! We still have lots of ideas about how we can improve our exhibit for 2026 and plant to make some tweaks, as well as try growing some other varieties for the next event. Our plan is to exhibit at RHS Malvern Spring Festival again in 2026, and in 2027 who knows…. Maybe the BIG ONE?! Watch this space!          

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    The long journey to RHS Gold!