Garden of Apologies Canadian Pepper Farm

This crazy pepper journey started off after a few decades playing in punk rock bands when I got married and in 2014, we settled in suburban Burlington. It was the first backyard I'd had as an adult so I thought it would be cool to grow a variety of vegetables to feed my family, but a raccoon destroyed everything except a ghost pepper plant. All I salvaged from my garden's season was a handful of ghost peppers, so I made a hot sauce with it. My Jamaican friend really liked it, so I launched my Sorry Sauce Canadian Hot Sauce business to make more of this Go Mango and other varieties to follow.

But I also dove right down the rabbit hole of peppers, and made them my focus. Not only were they raccoon proof, but they also came in so many different sizes, shapes and colours that it's always interesting and kind of exciting.

I started off growing mostly in buckets as we had a pool that took up most of our space but in 2017, we relocated to Lebanon, Ontario in Mapleton Township to get more growing area. We now have 3/4 acre of land, and it came with a renovated 1888 brick church to live in, so it's a pretty sweet deal.

Over the last several years I've grown a pretty wide variety of peppers, and the Garden has expanded from dozens to thousands of plants. You can get pictures and details for almost all of them over on the Pepperpedia. It's a work in progress with new details being added all the time, so don't snooze on it!

I grow a lot of my peppers for Sorry Sauce, but I've also grown for a wide range of other people. Here's a short list:

* League of Fire Americas Belt Match
* several Extreme Chili Alliance belt matches hosted by Heating up the Capital in Ottawa, ON
* Goat Fest in Kitchener
* 20+ Ontario hot sauce crafters
* a few apiaries who make hot honeys
* a local orchard for a spiced apple cider available at LCBO's across Ontario
* a local tree nut farm for their spicy blends of roasted nuts
* a Mennonite farrier for a poultice to rub between the hoof and bushing as he's shoeing horses

For 2023, we had about 110 cultivars and each one that produced pods is featured on our YouTube channel, Pepper School.

For in 2024, I had 105 different peppers across both fields. That's right! I've outgrown the main Garden of Apologies, so we added an extra 2000 sq ft of land rented from Winterhill Farm in Rockwood!

The rental land worked out well, but I was able to score an extra acre from my next door neighbour on a 5 year lease starting in 2025, so that led to almost 3000 plants of 149 varieties, and I have somewhere around 180 varieties on the go for 2026.

The Garden uses organic practices with compost, wood mulch, landscape fabric and hand tools rather than chemicals, pesticides and machines to keep it all natural and low carbon, and we use our solar power and captured rainwater wherever possible. We added a second greenhouse for the spring of 2024, and Wellington County's Experimental Acres programme helped us add a wind turbine and solar panel to it so we can generate clean energy to run heaters for the colder months. My goal is to heat your plate without heating your planet.



Check our progress through our Instagram and Facebook, and learn about the peppers we're growing on our YouTube channel.



Contact us at info@pepperfarm.ca