Growing Your Best Peppers

Peppers are a warm weather vegetable that can be finicky at times and difficult to grow, particularly in mild climates. Peppers require a lengthy growing season and warm temperatures within a specific range to thrive fully. There are two types of peppers: sweet and hot. Sweet peppers are bell-shaped and come in a variety of colors ranging from green and red to purple and even white. Hot peppers are smaller and thinner and come in shades of green, yellow, and red. While homegrown peppers can be difficult at times, they are not an impossible plant for the home gardener to grow. In this article, we'll provide some tips that will help you grow your best peppers ever.

Peppers can either be purchased as young plants from a nursery or grown indoors from seed. Either method is perfectly acceptable; it is simply a matter of how much time and effort you want to put into your plants. There are several benefits to growing the plants from seed. For starters, a packet contains enough seeds for an enormous garden of pepper plants and can usually be purchased for less than $2.00. Young pepper plants purchased from a nursery, on the other hand, will cost you about that same amount, per plant. So depending on how many plants you want, growing from seed can save quite a bit of money. Second, if you want to try some unusual varieties of peppers, you will most likely have to order seeds and grow them yourself. Nurseries will almost always have sweet bell, jalapeno, and banana peppers as young plants, but rarely will they have more obscure varieties such as Hungarian Yellow Wax, Anaheim, and Serrano peppers.

With peppers, it's critical not to set the plants out too early. Planting your peppers when the nights and days are still cool will almost certainly mean a small or non-existent crop. If nighttime temperatures may fall below 55 degrees Fahrenheit, then it's still to cold to plant pepper plants in the ground. When peppers do get planted too early, they will become stunted, and won't grow at all.

Pepper plants are well suited to growing in containers, so if you are an urban gardener with very little space, consider planting some peppers in attractive pots on a balcony or patio. If fertilizing the plants, be sure to switch over to a fertilizer that's high in phosphorus and potassium once fruit begins to set. One common mistake that many gardeners make is fertilizing with too much nitrogen, which results in a lovely, bushy plant, but very few peppers.

When handling your pepper plants, be gentle. The stems of the plants are very sensitive and can be easily damaged if handled roughly. This is particularly important when the plants are young and they're being transplanted. However, it's also a consideration when picking the fruit. Unlike other crops, peppers do not fall off the plants or remove easily. Many gardeners' first inclinations are to pull or tug at the pepper until it snaps off the plant. This is incorrect and can result in a damaged plant that will stop producing fruit. It's much better to keep a pair of garden scissors handy and simply snip the peppers off the plant by the individual fruits' stems.

Peppers do require a very long growing season to fully develop, between 70 and 90 days of consistently warm weather, depending on the variety you're growing. This can be frustrating to some gardeners, particularly those of us who live in cooler climates. One good solution is a greenhouse or hothouse. If you are fortunate enough to already have a greenhouse in your yard, consider starting your peppers a month or two early inside the greenhouse before setting them outside. This will produce a harvest of peppers sooner in the year.

If you don't have room for a large greenhouse in your yard, or simply don't want to make that big of an investment, consider a small indoor greenhouse or portable greenhouse that can be used indoors and out. These units are readily available for purchase from many catalog and online stores, and allow you to start seeds earlier in the year and bring plants to a larger and more established size before moving them outdoors. There are many indoor greenhouse kits small enough to fit on a tabletop or windowsill, which is the perfect solution for those of us who aren't blessed with a lot of space.

While it's true that peppers may not be the easiest homegrown vegetable, they are well worth the effort. Particularly if you are gardening to save money, peppers are an excellent crop, because they are typically quite expensive when purchased at the grocery store. With a little extra care and effort, any gardener can overcome the challenges of growing this finicky vegetable and produce a bumper crop of homegrown peppers!

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