Growing sweet peppers in a cool climate

Chillies are all the rage these days, it seems. Promoted everywhere as the perfect ornamental plant for a sunny patio, their cooler cousins are generally not mentioned. But for those of us who can’t take the heat, or just want to bite into succulent home-grown bell peppers, sweet peppers are just as easy to grow.

Peppers are in the same plant family as tomatoes, and are similar in many ways. Like tomatoes, they like lots of sunshine and potassium-rich feed to promote flowering and fruiting. They’re also thirsty plants, and wilt visibly when they’re running out of water.

I think the main reason that chilli plants are more popular is that their small fruits ripen more quickly – a bonus for gardeners with short growing seasons. However, there are many small-fruited sweet peppers, too, and varieties developed to give mature fruits quickly.

Pepper and pepino seedlingsIf you want to grow peppers from seed (and have more choice of variety) then you will need to start them indoors in the warm. A heated propagator will help, but a warm spot does just as well.

Topepo Rosso and Sweet NardelloPeppers will happily live out their entire lives indoors, in a pot on a sunny windowsill. I’ve grown them in a light and airy office – and they were a big hit with colleagues! A certain amount of root restriction encourages peppers to fruit, so they don’t resent being in a container. Neither do they mind being transplanted, so they’re easy to pot on as necessary.

Peppers outsideLast summer I had so many pepper plants that I planted them out into a sunny bed in my garden. We had a long, hot summer and the plants fruited really well – but the fruits still hadn’t ripened when they days started to get cooler. I harvested them all and ate them as green peppers, but another option is to uproot the plants and hang them upside down somewhere frost-free so that the fruits continue to ripen.

Peppers are naturally perennial plants, and given the right conditions it is possible to keep them alive over winter. They need to be kept frost-free and given as much light as possible. Low light conditions will cause the leaves to drop, but even sad plants can make a remarkable recovery in spring. The most important thing is not to over-water the plants while they’re effectively dormant.

Resources

For UK growers, Real Seeds have taken a lot of the guesswork out of growing sweet peppers by picking the best quick-fruiting varieties. They’re all open-pollinated, too, so you can save seeds from your own plants. (Peppers can cross-pollinate, so you will need to think about isolation if you grow more than one variety.)

One of my favourite gardening books is the Edible Pepper Garden, by Rosalind Creasy. Not only does it cover both sweet and chilli peppers (most books on the subject seem to be obsessed with chillies), but it’s heaving with lovely colour photos and there are recipes too. The book is available via Amazon US and UK.

© Copyright Emma Cooper, 2007. All rights reserved.

Posted 18 July 2007, 12:59.  

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