Growing Hot Peppers

Growing hot peppers is a very rewarding experience and a culinary delight!! That is if you like the heat.  Personally I can’t eat hot peppers but my husband loves them so we grow a lot of different kinds.

You do have to wait until the fall to see the wonders of growing hot peppers. Peppers take a long time to mature. So, even though, we were harvesting hot peppers at the end of the summer; they are truly bountiful now in October. That is if you live in a place where it stays warm until November!! You can see from this picture of Habanero peppers that they are prolific and what I mean about bountiful hot peppers! And not only are they so plentiful. They are truly beautiful as they shimmer in the fall sunshine! If you like hot peppers I recommend that you try your hand at growing them next spring.

Peppers need really good soil to grow well.  This Habanero pepper plant was gorgeous.  The one growing next to it didn’t do nearly so well.  It was a little scraggly with much fewer peppers and the plants were only 2 feet apart.  The soil was different just two feet away.  I would recommend that you dig a deep hole before you plant and amend the soil with compost, worm compost and rabbit manure if you have some available.  Of course, you can always use fertilizer.

Experiment with Growing Hot Peppers

There was another pepper plant that did very poorly at the end of the garden.  I am going to do an experiment this winter and put Bokashi compost and rabbit manure in the hole that I dig.  After the first frost when the pepper dies, I will dig this hole.  I will also do this with the scraggly Habanero pepper and see if we have better luck next year.  To the left is one of our Jalapeno harvests!  The Habanero peppers are the hottest that we grow.  The Jalapeno peppers are not as hot. Here is more info on the heat in Hot Peppers.

We grew all kinds of peppers including 2 sweet peppers (Green and Lunchbox Yellow).  I am listing the hot peppers below.  We bought some as seedlings at a nursery and we grew some from seed.

1. Habanero
2. Serrano
3. Red Chili
4. Dragon Cayenne
5. Jalapeno
6. Thai
7. Garden Salsa (not too hot)
8. Giant Jalapeno
9. Fish Peppers
10. Tabasco
11. Plain Chili

After we pick the peppers we cut them up.  We use latex gloves to protect ourselves from the heat!  Then we dry them using this which we bought from Amazon:

Then we grind them up and make all kinds of hot pepper mixtures! We gave one mix for a gift and it was greatly appreciated!

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