Gardening – Knowing your peppers

Peppers are essential to the cuisine of many countries, and with supermarket prices sometimes quite over the top, it’s worth knowing how to grow them. Among the chillies, cayenne, jalapeno and habanero are the most widely grown. Habanero chillies grow to 2-3cm wide and look like a little capsicum fruit with a pinched off end and are good for making into hot chilli sauce, as some heat is always lost in cooking. Cayenne chillies have the classic thin red fruit up to 15cm long. Only half as hot as the searingly hot habanero chillies, but their thin skins are good for drying and sprinkling. Jalapeno chillies are bullet shaped, usually 4-5cm long with thick skins that make them ideal for stuffing and roasting.
In the sweet peppers, often called capsicums, there are three main groups: bell, marconi and banana.

Like the name suggests, banana peppers are shaped a little like a banana and often start out life coloured yellow, changing to orange or red as they ripen. Although sweet, they are nearly indistinguishable from a very hot type called Hungarian hot wax. I once had the unenviable task of tasting the fruit of 200 plants to find the hot ones after they were accidentally mixed up at planting. Also long and slender, but with deep lobes and sweeter taste, are the classic Italian marconi peppers. Bell peppers are the typical chunky capsicums that are found in every grocer. Mini bell peppers are also cute to grow, sweet and great for salads.

Whether it is chillies or capsicums, the key to bountiful crops of peppers is a warm, long growing season, as it can take four months from sowing to first harvest. Once harvesting is underway they will keep producing until it becomes too cold, so the longer the growing season, the more fruit you will get.

The ideal growing temperature is 18 to 25°C both day and night, so a little bit of trickery is required to get a decent crop.

Start now by sowing the seed indoors on a sunny windowsill or in a greenhouse. As the roots fill the pot, progressively pot them up to keep them growing vigorously, but keep the seedlings inside until the soil in your garden is at least 10°C at 10cm depth at 10am. This easy to remember rule is the absolute minimum for this crop to thrive. In our region, this temperature might be achieved before the end of October, but in cold seasons it could be as late as mid-November.

Covering the garden with clear plastic or frost cloth cloches a few weeks before planting will help warm the soil, but leave the cloches on till the plants touch the plastic, so they get the maximum benefit. Up to four weeks extra growing time can be gained this way, which can make all the difference. Gradually acclimatise the crop to outdoor conditions by lifting the sides of the cloche on sunny days.

To keep setting fruit, peppers need to continue growing vigorously so plant in rich, fertile, well-drained deep loam soils with a decent base dressing of fertiliser. They are gross feeders, so further side dressings at regular intervals are needed once fruit has started to set.

Balancing growth with fruit production is the next trick to learn with peppers, particularly those with big fruit such as capsicums. All peppers start with a single stem which branches where the first flower (the crown bud) forms. This first bud should be removed and on weaker plants so should the next set of flowers to form. This allows the plant to develop enough leaves to support decent sized fruit. An overload can also be corrected by harvesting green, as ripening takes a lot of energy from the plant. At this stage they are often more pungent, but less hot. Once they ripen to red, orange, yellow or purple, according to the variety, the flavours are richer and hotter, but tend to be less pungent.