In Your Garden with Jenny Watts

Wake Up your Taste Buds with Flavorful Peppers

Pepper popularity just keeps growing and every year gardeners are trying out new
varieties. The number of pepper varieties available, especially the hot types and sweet non-bells,
has exploded and now numbers in the hundreds.
Peppers are grouped into three types: sweet bell peppers, sweet non-bell peppers and hot
peppers ranging from warm to blazing hot. The big development in bell peppers has been a
variety of colorful bells ranging from red, orange and yellow to lilac, purple and chocolate. In
standard green bells, California Wonder and Bell Boy are still favorites. They turn to bright red
as they ripen. However, Red Beauty, which produces sweet red peppers in only 68 days, is the
most popular bell pepper today.
The sweet non-bells range from the little Italian Pepperoncini peppers which are good for
pickling to the long, yellow Sweet Bananas. Corno di Toro, the heirloom Horn of the Bull
pepper, is imported from Italy. Fruits are 8 to 10 inches long, curved much like a bulls horn, and
ripen to a gorgeous red cone. Pimientos, with their heart-shaped fruits, are ideal for salads,
garnishes and canning.
Italian Long Sweet, widely used in Italian cooking, is very sweet when red-ripe. Colorful
Gypsy peppers turn from yellow to orange-red and they are crunchy, firm and sweet.
Hot peppers are usually called chilis. Anaheim is a long, green chili that is mildly hot.
Ancho-Pablano has heart-shaped fruits that are called Poblanos when used green and stuffed to
make chili rellenos; and called Anchos when dried and ground into chili powder. Pasilla, the
popular Chili negro, is mildly hot and slightly sweet and is used in many Mexican dishes,
including mole sauce.
Hot and spicy Jalapenos and flavorful Serranos used to be considered the hot peppers.
Along with Hungarian Wax, which has spicy, fairly hot banana shaped fruits that are perfect for
pickling, and Fresno, small fruits with fiery flavor, they run in the mid-range of the heat scale.
Slightly hotter are Tabasco, bred for the famous extra-hot Tabasco sauce, with fruits that
ripen from yellow-green to red, and Cayenne, which has long, slender, slightly wrinkled fruit that
is excellent for chili and homemade salsa.
But for the really hot peppers there are Habaneros, the hottest chili in the world, and
Thai Hot Dragon, eight times hotter than Jalapeno, Jamaica Scotch Bonnet, smoky and fiery
hot, and Caribbean Red, said to be hotter than all the rest.
Peppers like warm weather and can be damaged more easily by cold weather than
tomatoes. Use hot caps or Walls-O-Water to get them started early. They like soil rich in
organic matter and adequate moisture through the summer. Plant peppers in full sun, about 18
inches apart. Place some bone meal in the planting hole to help prevent blossom-end rot. Mulch
to keep down weeds and keep in soil moisture. Some gardeners mulch the plants with black
plastic to warm the soil as much as possible, which can increase yields.
Enjoy some new taste sensations with flavorful peppers this summer.