My Chili Farm: An Authentic Open Book
For us Padang people, chili is a basic necessity — right up there with air, water, and rice. Eating rice without chili is like eating without salt: bland and lifeless. No matter how famous Padang cuisine is, it just wouldn’t taste as good, as bold, or as satisfying without chili in it. So no matter how expensive chilies get, they remain a top item on every mother’s shopping list. Some even joke that chili must never be missing from the table.
If you’re a farmer, planting chili can be a quick way to make money — if you’re lucky enough to harvest when prices are above 60,000 rupiah per kilogram. But it can also be a fast track to loss if luck isn’t on your side. When chili prices drop below 30,000 rupiah per kilogram, and fertilizers and pesticides are sky-high, the numbers just don’t add up. Around here, chili is known as a high-maintenance crop. It demands a lot of fertilizer and insecticides. Just a week after planting, you’re already applying manure. To boost growth, you’re told to use Ultradap and NPK. Once the plants start flowering, you switch to MKP and NPK. And don’t forget the insecticides you have to spray regularly to keep pests and fungi at bay, so the leaves stay broad and the flowers bloom abundantly.
But despite all that care, the plant can suddenly die without warning, just when it’s fruiting most heavily — right when you’re most attached to it, it gives up. The cause might be oxygen-deprived roots, or worse, fusarium fungus attacking the roots. The plants will wilt, one or two stems at a time, until nothing is left.
Still, armed with nothing but optimism, we decided to try our hand at growing chilies. Not the regular kind that mothers usually buy, but what they call cabe setan — Cayenne devil. For Padang people, there are four types of chilies based on how they’re used. The most common is red chili, used in fried dishes and ground a bit coarsely. It’s also used for gulai (curry) or asam pedas (sour and spicy soup), in which case it’s ground into a fine paste. The second type is the large green chili, used in similar ways. When fried, it’s ground very coarsely. Green chilies are rarely used in gulai except for a signature Bukittinggi dish called gulai itiak lado mudo — young chili duck curry. And trust me, it’s incredibly delicious! For gulai, we usually use bird’s eye chilies — small but intensely hot. We don’t use many of them because of their spiciness. They’re also eaten raw alongside fried snacks.
In recent years, a rather extreme food trend has taken off among young people in West Sumatra: eating insanely spicy food with quirky names. For example, Narako Noodles level 1 to 5, where the heat increases with the number. Or Caruik Noodles level 1 to 4. So what does this have to do with chilies? These trendy dishes use devil’s chili. Compared to the other three types, its price is more reasonable and stable — and that’s exactly why we chose to plant it. We had no experience, no theory, no real plan. But more importantly, we needed to rotate our crops. The land had previously been planted with water spinach and spinach, and after two failed harvests, we decided to switch to chilies, hoping for a decent yield at a fair price.
It all started simply enough. A neighbor gave us some Cayenne devils that were beginning to rot. I sowed them in polybags, and two weeks later, they sprouted thickly. I then transplanted the seedlings one by one into smaller polybags. A month later, they were ready to go into the ground. With a quiet prayer and a hopeful whisper, we planted 500 saplings. A week later, following my memory of how my father used to farm, we gave them manure. But apparently, someone wasn’t happy about those tiny chili plants: sparrows. For some reason, flocks of them pecked at the stems and leaves of the week-old plants. The result? Within two days, only bare stems remained. Our first pest problem wasn’t insects — it was sparrows.
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Rain came in the second week, and the baby plants started pushing out tiny new leaves. They managed to survive the bird attacks. Following advice I’d seen on YouTube, I started giving them NPK mixed with Ultradap. The chilies on the left side began to thrive. Within two weeks, they were lush, with thick, broad leaves. I felt like I’d succeeded. It turned out that growing chilies wasn’t as hard as everyone said. But the plants on the right side were still struggling against the sparrows whenever we weren’t watching or were busy with other work. Looking at them, I started to lose hope.
Two months later, the left-row chilies began to flower. I was overjoyed. None had died. Though their growth wasn’t uniform, at least they looked promising. The right row, however, was a different story. Even though they got the same fertilizer — just in smaller amounts — their growth was painfully slow. Then things took a turn. The left-row chilies, which had just started fruiting, began to wilt for no apparent reason. One by one, they slowly died. We lost them all before we could harvest a single fruit. Meanwhile, the right-row chilies were slowly catching up. I felt like giving up, but quitting seemed too easy. We pulled out the wilted plants and found their roots covered in white fungus. Fusarium. I started racking my brain for a solution.
And so the experiment began. The chili field became our laboratory, with 500 devil’s chili plants as our subjects. Fusarium fungus thrives in low pH soil — a leftover from the fertilizers we’d used for the spinach and water spinach. The soil had become acidic. So every time we pulled out a wilted plant, we neutralized the soil with dolomite lime and trichoderma . Then we switched to natural fertilizers: manure and compost. When we replanted, none of the new plants died. As for the curled leaves caused by insects, we sprayed them with a turmeric and garlic mixture. It wasn’t a perfect fix, but the plants improved significantly. The right-row chilies, meanwhile, were doing much better than in the early days. They had even grown tough enough to withstand the sparrows.
From those chilies, we learned a great deal. The first failure taught me to be grateful for many things. For one, synthetic fertilizers and pesticides might solve one problem, but they often create new ones. Nature has its own way of healing, and plants are no exception. From those chilies, I realized that growing them doesn’t actually require as much capital as people claim. All it takes is giving them space and the chance to grow naturally, supported by natural food and natural pest control. Chilies grown this way are healthier, tastier, and longer-lived.
That realization made me look around and see the abundance of natural fertilizers available right in our environment. I stopped throwing away kitchen scraps. I started saving rice-washing water, keeping eggshells instead of tossing them, and even pouring fish or chicken washing water onto other plants. I no longer threw out onion skins; instead, I soaked them in water for a few days and used the liquid as a natural pesticide. I dried eggshells, ground them into powder, and used them as a calcium source for plants. Kitchen waste — vegetable peels and fruit scraps — I collected in a container, mixed with soil, and let it turn into compost over several weeks. Leftover rice and other food scraps went into another container, which becomes fertilizer.
I had never been a farmer before. I’m just a farmer’s daughter who was pushed to study so I wouldn’t end up like my father. I later became an English teacher, but I eventually quit — partly to care for my children, partly for health reasons. I won’t become a farmer like my beloved father; I want to be my own kind of farmer, one who keeps learning, keeps working, and keeps getting to know whatever I plant and nurture. The chilies are still growing. Some are already fruiting, some are flowering, and some haven’t done much at all. They are my teachers — my companions in endless learning, experimenting, exploring, and innovating. Those chilies are one of my hopes for a better life.
This month, I will attempt something new: cultivating red chilies using an intercropping system. My previous chili plants encountered certain difficulties; during periods of rain or wind, chili plants bearing abundant fruit tended to collapse quite easily due to the complete absence of structural support. Some plants died as their roots were uprooted when they fell. Consequently, I began to consider whether it would be feasible to intercrop chilies with sweet corn. I have already begun planting corn; some seeds have germinated while others have not. Simultaneously, I am germinating red chili seeds in polybags, and they have begun to grow. I intend to transplant these small chili seedlings once they reach approximately one month of age and plant them alongside the corn that has begun to grow. Sweet corn, which can generally be harvested at approximately four months of age, may serve as a natural support for the red chilies. Even after the corn is harvested, its stalks can be cut and remain functional as supports when the chilies bear fruit. I hope this approach will prove successful and that I will be able to present a more detailed account of how to integrate chili and corn cultivation next month.
