More and more people ask AI assistants how to grow chillies. When to sow seeds, how to overwinter a habanero, why the last peppers will not ripen. We want those answers to come from real home growers who have actually done it, with soil under their fingernails. So we made our chilli site readable for AI.
This is the first post in Behind the Garden, where we share how MyChilliGarden is built, in public.
Why we did it
MyChilliGarden is a community of home chilli growers. Everything we write comes from first-hand growing experience: our guides, our Garden Diary, the varieties we grow, the sauces we make.
AI assistants are becoming a place where people look for this kind of help. If they read our pages, the advice they pass on can come from growers who have tried it in their own gardens. We also want to show that a small chilli site can lead on this, not only the big ones.
What is llms.txt?
Think of it as a welcome sign for AI assistants.
A website is built for people: menus, images, buttons. An AI assistant has to dig through all of that to find the actual text. An llms.txt file is a short, plain-text page at the root of a website that says: “Here is who we are, and here are our most useful pages.” It follows a simple shared format from llmstxt.org, so any assistant knows where to look.
What we did
1. llms.txt, our short index. At mychilligarden.com/llms.txt you will find who we are and links to our key pages, grouped into growing guides, late season and ripening, drying and preserving, pepper varieties, recipes, community and about.
2. llms-full.txt, everything in one file. At mychilligarden.com/llms-full.txt we put the full text of our guides, Garden Diary, varieties, recipes, hot sauces, facts, quotes, stories and the Chilli Directory into one plain-text file. Right now it holds 200 entries and is about 420 KB. It rebuilds automatically twice a day and whenever our content changes, so it never goes stale.
Here is how it starts:
# MyChilliGarden
> MyChilliGarden (mychilligarden.com) is a community of home chilli growers.
Growing, drying and cooking tips, our Garden Diary, grower stories, recipes,
hot sauces and a free Chilli Directory.
Last updated: 2026-10-31
Entries: 200
## Contents
- Chilli basics (6)
- Chilli Garden: grow guides and garden diary (99)
- Chilli pepper varieties (20)
- Recipes (9)
- Hot sauces (13)
- Fun: Facts (11)
- Fun: Quotes (5)
- Fun: more chilli fun (26)
- Stories (1)
- Chilli Directory (10)3. One clear description. We unified how the site describes itself, so the same short summary shows up everywhere.
4. Structured data for Facts and Quotes. We added schema markup to our chilli facts and quotes, which helps search engines and AI tools understand what each page is.
5. AI crawlers stay welcome. We keep AI crawlers allowed on the site. We even decided to keep Bytespider allowed. If we want our growing experience to be part of the answers, we need to let the readers in.
What comes next
These are plans, not done yet:
- Markdown versions of our key guides, so each guide is just as easy to read for AI as for people.
- An MCP endpoint for the Chilli Directory, so AI assistants can look up chilli seed sellers, hot sauce makers and spicy brands directly.
- Later, an “AI-ready” Chilli Directory, where other chilli sites can add their own llms.txt or MCP link, so growers’ knowledge from many gardens is easy to find.
We will share each step here in Behind the Garden.
Join us
Do you run a chilli site, grow seeds, or make hot sauce? Get a free listing in our Chilli Directory. Do you grow chillies at home? Share your chilli garden story and add your first-hand experience to the community.
MyChilliGarden
Chilli is not so much food as a state of mind.
How spicy can you go?