How to Grow Peppers - From Bell to Ghost Peppers
Credit Unsplash
Every Spring I sit down with my seed packets and a pen and paper and try to plan out my vegetable garden. I have to juggle spacing, crop rotation, companion planting, and succession planting - having one crop ready to plant as another is finishing up. Inevitably, I end up reading the back of my seed packets 100 times because I'll instantly forget how far apart cabbage is supposed to be spaced!
And why is it so hard to do calendar math?? Our last frost date in Virginia is around April 16. Why is it so hard to figure out when 6 or 8 weeks before last frost date is??
THEN I usually go outside with my seedlings (that I started too early - of course) and have to google the spacing on my phone...is it just me? Anyone else?
I’ve always wanted a quick cheat sheet like this, so hopefully you’ll find it useful too! I plan on printing out a single printed cheat sheet and laminating it so I can take it out to the garden with me...but that's a project for another day.
GROWING PEPPERS
Peppers are a favorite vegetable of mine. Mainly because they’re so easy and low maintenance to grow. As long as you set them up with the right water and sunlight, you can pretty much forget about them.
They are very resistant to pests, fungus, and drought resistant – still, plan to give them about an inch of water a week. They also do great in containers or indoors with plenty of light!
I mainly grow jalapenos, but last year I had great luck with a habanero plant my mother in law gave me. It was HUGE. Here’s a pic of my gardener in training last year, helping me harvest:
These habaneros I turned into a fermented hot sauce following Daddy Kirb’s recipe that my family RAVED about. It was sweet, spicy, tangy with just the right umami flavor. There was almost a fight when a guest started hoarding the sauce for himself! We ate it simply on crackers and cream cheese.
The jalapenos I grow, I add to salsas and cocktail de cameron, but usually have so much left over that I pickle them and give them away as gifts. Check back soon for my post on pickled peppers!
NUTRITIONAL VALUE OF PEPPERS
While the class of “peppers” can be anything from bell peppers or banana peppers to ghost and habanero peppers, they are all relatively similar in nutritional value.
The best benefit of eating peppers is their high Vitamin A, Vitamin C, Vitamin K, and B6 content. In addition to these, they are also high in Omega 6 fatty acids. The amounts vary by type of pepper, but I’m going to focus on bell peppers, as you’re less likely to get an entire cup of jalapenos as you are bell peppers!
One cup of raw bell pepper has 11% of your daily recommended dose of Vitamin A, 200% of your Vitamin C (!!), 14% of your Vitamin K, and 17% of your B6. Makes you think better of those fajitas!
Overall, peppers are a great, easy vegetable to start with.
PEPPERS
Soil pH
6.0-8.0
Sunlight
8-10 hours
Water
1-2 inches per week
Planting Time
Can be started indoors, but transplant after the last frost
Compatible With
Basil, Carrots, Onions, Lettuce, Beets, Tomatoes, Garlic
Avoid Planting With
Broccoli, Cabbage, Beans, Fennel
Spacing
18-24 inches
Maintenance
Low maintenance. Water and weed. Each pepper plant will need some sort of support: a cage or trellis.
Harvesting Fruit
Sweet pepper varieties will mature between 60-90 days. Hot varieties can take up to 150 days.
Saving The Seeds
Allow a few peppers to stay on the vine until they begin to wrinkle. Take them off, harvest the seeds and allow them to dry.
Do you grow peppers? What's your favorite to grow? Favorite to cook with?
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Last year we got a ghost pepper plant at the Baker Creek planting festival. By summer’s end that plant was almost five feet tall! It was a tree! Peppers really are a super easy plant to start with. They can take as much neglect as any garden plant I’ve come across! I’d never looked up the nutritional value of peppers. I figured they were pretty nutritious, but I had no idea they were that good!
I want to research the medicinal benefits of them too! I know capcacin - that gives peppers their heat - is also used in a lot of muscle rubs supposedly to relax muscles?
And I've had jalapenos produce well after our first snowstorm! Bell peppers are tricky for me tho...most of the time they end up really small before falling off - I'm probably not fertilizing them enough.
I know a woman who makes a hot pepper extract and uses it in a salve to apply to her joints for R.A. pain relief.
My bells get decent sized, but they're often thin walled. I guess we'll just have to keep working on it.