Harvest to Table

Sweet peppers can be picked when immature or full size, green or red. Hot peppers can be picked at any time for fresh use; hot peppers for drying or pickling should be picked when fully ripe. Pick all peppers before the first light frost. Most peppers will eventually turn red if left on the vine; [...]

Peppers–sweet and hot–are native to the tropics. They require much the same cultural treatment as tomatoes, except that peppers are perhaps a bit more tender. The easiest way to start peppers is to buy transplants at the garden center. If you start peppers from seed outdoors, sow seeds in pots in mid-spring for transplant in [...]

Slice open a hot pepper and you will see tiny blisterlike sacs on the inner wall of the pepper. These sacs contain capsaicinoids or organic chemicals. Capsaicinoids make peppers hot. The more sacs you see on the inside of a pepper the hotter the pepper will be. When a pepper is cut or handled roughly [...]

Hot peppers are distinguished from sweet peppers simply by their pungency or hotness of flavor. There are thousands of hot pepper varieties in the world. (This is the case because peppers easily cross pollinate to produce new kinds.) The hotness of a pepper is determined by number of blisterlike sacs of capsaicinoids on the interior [...]

Peppers–sweet peppers and hot peppers–share nearly all of the cultural and growing requirements of tomatoes. If you can grow tomatoes, you can grow peppers. Choose a site with full sun where the soil is moisture retentive but well-draining. If you are planting sweet peppers and hot peppers in the garden, give them some distance they [...]

Peppers demand a warm location from start to finish. For peppers to prosper: sow pepper seed in a warm seed bed and transplant seedlings into a warm planting bed where the air temperature will remain consistently warm until harvest. Cool weather and soil are a pepper’s greatest challenge. Here are best bet, easy-to-grow peppers, both [...]

Hot peppers are most easily grown from transplants. Start hot pepper seed indoors 6 to 8 weeks before the date you intend to set peppers into the garden. Peppers can be seeded in the garden or transplanted out 2 to 3 weeks after the last frost in spring after the soil temperature has risen to [...]

There are more than 200 varieties of chilies or hot peppers. Sometimes the names of chilies can get a bit confusing because often the same pepper will be known by two or even three different names. Here’s a quick users’ guide to about four dozen very popular chilies and how you can used them in [...]

Chilies or hot peppers can be eaten raw, baked, fried, grilled, or stuffed. They are used as a vegetable fresh and as a spice dried. Chilies, like sweet peppers, are not only aromatic—like celery and onion—but contain natural chemicals that enhance the flavor of other foods during cooking. Generally, small, hot chilies—such as the jalapeño, [...]