Crops & Breeds › Vegetable Garden

🌶️ Peppers

Vegetable Garden · growing reference

When to plant

In USDA zone 6, for example: Plant around Apr 29, once the soil has warmed — sown into cold ground it just sits. Start seeds indoors ~8 weeks earlier.

Dates are the typical window for each zone's average frost dates — your own last frost can differ by a couple of weeks. Zone 10 and warmer is effectively frost-free: plant to the season, not the frost. Southern Hemisphere: shift six months.

Pepper Types

• Sweet Italian · 65 days · 3–6 lbs/plant — Thin-walled frying and roasting peppers (Cubanelle, Corno di Toro, Jimmy Nardello) — sweetest and quickest.
• Bell · 72 days · 3–6 lbs/plant — The blocky garden standard — picked green, or left to sweeten (red/yellow is a ripe green, a variety not a type).
• Pimiento · 78 days · 2–4 lbs/plant — Thick sweet heart-shaped reds — the pimento-cheese and stuffed-olive pepper; grown to full ripe, so it runs late.
• Jalapeño · 72 days · 2–4 lbs/plant — The reference hot — thick-walled and moderate; corking lines mark peak. Serrano and the other medium annuum hots log here.
• Cayenne · 80 days · 1–3 lbs/plant — Long thin chiles for drying and sauce (and the ripening annuum long-hots) — takes most of the season to redden.
• Habanero · 95 days · 1–3 lbs/plant — C. chinense — the fruity super-hots (Scotch bonnet, ghost); slow erratic warm germination, the longest haul to ripe.