Welcome to chillidesign.ie and our new blog. I hope over the coming months and years we will simplify the web design process for our new clients and continue to serve our current client’s with the same high standard of services as before.

As my first blog entry I am putting together a brief history of Chilli’s to give you an idea of some of the inspiration behind our new domain name and our rebranding from www.cmm.ie

Christopher Columbus, in his unproductive search for riches across the Atlantic Ocean in -1492, mistook America for India. He named the natives Indians, and he also took the liberty of placing an improper label on what was to become one of the Southwest’s most popular vegetables.
Believing he had found an exotic form of black pepper, Columbus took plants back with him to Spain and told the Europeans it was “the world’s finest pepper.”
Pepper, most commonly in the form of black and white grindings, is a woody vine native to the East Indies. Chilli - green and red, and a different species entirely - has its roots almost 10,000 miles away.
Columbus’ chilli excavations probably took place on one of several islands near the North and Central American coasts. However, most historians agree that South America, chiefly Bolivia, is the source of the original chilli plant.
Tracing the plant’s exact journey over time to North America is difficult. Ancient tribes of people might have carried the plant onto the continent, or Spaniards, hoping to settle the land along the Gulf Coast, might have planted the continent’s first crops.
By the mid-1500s, thousands of acres of chilli plants, by then called peppers, had been planted in Europe.
Seeds from the chilli plant began following European travellers to North America, and soon many farmers were learning to grow their own chilli crops. Along the way, new crossbred chillies evolved.
The plant became a staple of American Indian crops, and in 1696 it practically saved dozens of tribes in New Mexico, according to “The History of New Mexico” by Charles Coan.
The famine of 1696 destroyed crops, killed livestock and threatened human lives, but the chilli plant thrived and helped feed people who otherwise might have starved.
In the late 19th century, chilli was growing both wild and tame along the Rio Grande in West Texas and southern New Mexico.
A major early technology boost to the crop came in 1888 when a horticulturist from the New Mexico College of Agriculture and Mechanical Arts - now New Mexico State University began experimentation into the crossbreeding and hybrid growth of chilli, according to the university’s Chilli Pepper Institute.
Within a decade, several new artificially created breeds of chilli sprouted up across the Southwest.
In 1906, the first known transplantation of New Mexican chilli occurred when Emilio Ortega, a sheriff from California, took chilli seeds from New Mexico back to Anaheim and coined a name for his new pepper. Known as the Anaheim, it is a variety of the plant that still grows in New Mexico today.
Just five years later, an agricultural guru created the strongest breed of New Mexican chilli. Calling his product the No. 9, Fabian Garcia’s pepper was the most durable crop in the south until crossbreeding technology strengthened in the late 1960s.
Today, the chilli — encompassing more than 65 different varieties and colours — is the state’s most valuable processed crop. More than 1,500 farmers harvest almost 20000 acres of chilli every year in New Mexico, generating $200 million in sales.