As the weather warms and spring approaches, perhaps it’s time to think about adding a little warmth and spice to your garden at home. Add a little spice to your crop haul this year with peppers. They grow well in the Columbia Basin, according to one local gardener.

Dave Ruffin, a former Moses Lake Police Department chief and current criminal justice instructor for Columbia Basin Technical Skills Center, has been growing peppers and super-hot peppers for about 20 years in his backyard. He said he grows 15 to 20 pepper varieties in his garden and typically ends up with more peppers than anyone could ever want.

Ruffin said his dad grew jalapeños in a small garden and he has been eating hot peppers since he was 12 years old.

“My dad always had jalapeños and when we didn’t have them, we’d always buy them in the store,” Ruffin said. “I probably legitimately eat anywhere between 50 and 65 pounds of peppers each year.”

Ruffin’s garden behind his house is about 10 feet by 120 feet, making a long, slender setup nestled beside his back fence. He said he typically tries to start planting as quickly as possible after the last frost of the year.

He aims to get the ground ready for planting by the beginning of April. He starts the process by checking the soil and seeing what needs to be added to it to help his peppers and tomato plants.

“Peppers and tomatoes are about the same, but they need somewhere around that neutral pH to grow really well,” Ruffin said. “They’ll grow, but if the pH is wrong, sometimes you’ll get that blossom rot.”

He will cut off the tops of the plants left from last year when he cleans out the garden each spring, but will sometimes leave the roots in the ground to add some natural nutrients to the soil.

Ruffin’s garden was still filled with leftover peppers from last season on Wednesday afternoon, and he said he’ll leave the leftover pods, too, to feed nutrients into the ground. He adds a 10-10-10 fertilizer — 10% nitrogen, 10% phosphate and 10% potash — when he’s putting his seeds in the ground.

Ruffin uses a drip irrigation system with an electric timer in his garden and said it has worked really well for him.

By late spring to early summer, he said, his garden is overflowing with peppers to harvest, from more mild to as hot as they come.

“I grow serranos, jalapeños, which are pretty low on the heat scale,” Ruffin said. “But i grow a lot of those, I grow Santa Fes and cayennes, which are a bit warmer, and then I grow the super-hots, which are like the ghost peppers, the super habaneros, some of the Caribbean habaneros and then the reapers and chocolate scorpions.”

Super-hot peppers like the Chocolate Trinidad Scorpions and ghost peppers are the first ones Ruffin said he tries to get in the ground. He said their growing season is a little longer than some of the milder peppers, so it is important to get them in the ground as quick as possible.

For milder peppers, he said they can go in anytime in the middle of May once the region is frost-free. He said he starts a lot of his plants from seeds.

Ruffin has cages around his pepper and tomato plants in his garden, originally to deter animals. He’s found the cages can also keep the bushier pepper plants, such as the ghost peppers, upright and off the ground.

“I think it probably helps some with disease and some insect stuff too,” Ruffin said.

He said peppers are relatively easy to grow for the area. The super-hot peppers are a little trickier with the longer growing season.

“If you’ve got decent soil with a little bit of sand, jalapeños and serranos and most of the milder peppers grow very well here, in my opinion,” Ruffin said.

He said he doesn’t really see his garden expanding anytime soon as he’s already up to his neck in peppers each year, but he has considered adding a greenhouse to get an earlier start for his super-hot peppers.

Casey McCarthy can be reached via email at cmccarthy@columbiabasinherald.com.