Dear Farm Community,

Big week on the farm! We harvested our first EVER edamame grown at Diamond Hill, started digging this year’s sweet potatoes, absolutely boiled under the unrelenting sun, and ate an unholy amount of chips & queso on Friday to celebrate Averi’s last day ❤️ ❤️ ❤️

We’re also so stoked to be getting some good harvests off another very special crop: a hot pepper with quite the story! This week, we’d love to share with you the lore of the Georgia Jeanette, and how this little piece of Athens plant history came to be growing at Diamond Hill Farm.

THE LORE OF THE GEORGIA JEANETTE………..

Ten years ago, Athens gardener and county park supervisor/programmer Lawson Moore went on a snorkeling trip to Aruba and, as he tends to do, started asking around about what the locals grew in their gardens. His Airbnb host told him about the Madam Jeanette, a famously hot Caribbean pepper used all kinds of dishes throughout the region. Lawson asked if she had any seeds he could bring home.

Instead, as he told Flagpole’s Erin France in their most recent issue, “She brings me one pepper, just one.” And thus began his great hot pepper journey. Lawson brought the seeds home to Athens and planted them. Nothing happened. Eventually, convinced the experiment had failed, he dumped the potting soil into his compost heap. A few weeks later, by some small act of magic, three tiny pepper plants appeared.

Those first plants did not particularly enjoy Georgia. They were adapted to the steady heat, dry climate, and consistent daylight of the Caribbean, not the great humid bowl of soup we call a Georgia summer. But Lawson kept it going year after year. For the next decade, he saved seed from the plants that did best here, selecting generation after generation for vigor, earlier fruit production, and strong, self-supporting plants. Slowly, the pepper changed. It became better suited to our climate, a little less blisteringly hot, and distinctly its own thing: the Georgia Jeanette.

Flagpole writer Erin France describes the resulting pepper as pineapple-y and spicy, with heat closer to a jalapeño than a habanero. But perhaps the sweetest and most Athens part of the whole story is that Lawson isn’t trying to turn his creation into some big commercial variety. He wants it to stay here, passed around, grown and eaten by people in locally in Athens and the surrounding areas. As Lawson put it, “The Georgia Jeanette is truly an Athens pepper.”

And you should absolutely read the whole story in Flagpole, because Erin tells it beautifully!!

HOW’D THEY GET TO DIAMOND HILL??

Lawson is a longtime friend of the farm, with roots in our little Diamond Hill orbit through years of working in Athens parks alongside Zach, former DHF delivery driver and current spouse-of-a-DHF-farmer. Somewhere along the way we all got to talking about these peppers, and naturally, our ears perked right up! One of our favorite parts of farming here is getting to be woven into the wider Athens community, where friendships, work, food, and growing things all overlap in funny little ways. So when Lawson offered us some Georgia Jeanette plants this year, it felt especially fitting that a pepper bred right here in Athens would make its way into our fields. And obviously, the answer was YES!!!

And friends!!! THEY ARE BEAUTIFUL.

The plants are big, healthy, and fruiting like crazy, and we’re officially harvesting Diamond Hill Farm-grown Georgia Jeanettes! We feel pretty dang lucky to be a part of their journey and had the pleasure of hosting Lawson on the farm to take a look at our planting. There’s something extra special about tending a crop with such a close-to-home history, shaped over a decade by a friend’s observation, patience, seed-saving, and careful attention to a plant’s spirit.

Large Share CSA members will find Georgia Jeanettes in their shares this week, and Tues/Thurs Standard Share members will find a few as options in the swap box. Everybody else keep your eyes peeled at market!

In CSA shares this week, we’ve also got that darling edamame harvest and sweet potatoes to go around!

Edamame is super easy to cook. Leave the beans in their pods, toss them into a pot of boiling salted water for about 4–5 minutes, then drain and sprinkle with a little flaky salt. To eat, just pop the beans out of the pod with your teeth or fingers and discard the pod. They’re delicious warm, room temp, or chilled!

And while it may not exactly be cozy sweet potato weather yet, these freshly harvested jewels don’t have to mean soup and sweaters. Try these Sweet Potato Tacos with black beans and a bright avocado-lime sauce, or this Sweet Potato Salad with arugula, avocado, feta, pepitas, and lemony tahini dressing. Sweet potatoes, but make it September in Georgia :-)

pickin’ pecks of peppers,
Diamond Hill Farmers

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