<aside> 💡 For my guide to chili peppers go here
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I’m nervous to write a guide to growing sweet peppers, because they vary quite considerably by variety, sowing date, weather conditions, access to grow lights etc. In 2021 my friends down south had hardly harvested a single pepper by September, whereas we’d been picking since July, with a quite similar approach. Over the years though we’ve worked hard to eliminate the variables and had excellent and consistent results using the system that I outline here.
I use a rating system to help me decide what to grow and it considers lots of factors, but the main ones are how tasty it is, healthy it is to eat, how expensive it is to buy, how big its harvest is, when its harvest period is and whether I can buy it organically and if not how much it's sprayed.
Sweet peppers score moderately well in this system. They are extremely tasty, expensive to buy and provide a reasonable harvest. The harvest can be significantly increased if you start them early and keep them above 11c for their whole lives. The harvest period is long and the fruits are versatile, importantly the fruits don’t spoil, they hold well on the plant and can be used at different stages of ripeness.
However they are demanding plants and to get a good yield takes time, effort and sometimes investment.
Sweet pepper yields can vary quite a bit between varieties and plants grown in pots often yield less than plants in the ground. If you like peppers I’d say that 6 plants would be enough for one person and I plant 6 plants/m2, so 1m2/person is a good place to start.
Peppers are fickle plants. They need warm, sunny conditions, but not too warm or too sunny, in fact in mid summer they benefit from a little shade. They are very susceptible to an early frost and in the worst years, we’ve lost as many as 20% of our plants by being impatient. Chilis grow well in containers, but we prefer growing sweet peppers in the ground, because they are easier to care for when you don’t need to think about watering too much. They prefer slightly acid soil, but they grow just fine for us in slightly alkaline conditions.
Peppers are very slow growing, especially when they don’t get enough light or heat. The balance is important and I like to err on the side of too much light, provided they are always above 11c. As a result they are best started early, but how early depends on whether you can keep the temperature above 11c and provide supplemental light. They often take 3-4 months from sowing to planting, which is the longest time in pots for anything that I grow. They flower in late spring and summer and fruit in summer and autumn, fruits keep ripening all through autumn.
<aside> 💡 They will actually fruit for longer than this provided enough heat and light, but it’s not cost effective, so whilst it’s a fun thing to do, we don’t bother anymore.
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Finally they are self-fertile, so their fruit sets without pollinating insects or manual fertilising with a brush etc.
Plants are perennial, in that you can save plants from one year to the next, provided you prune them back and store them well above freezing. However this takes up a lot of space, about 6 times as much as growing new plants, so I don’t bother.
<aside> 💡 For more details on the model that I use for describing harvest periods (first earlies, second earlies etc) please see the chapter on my growing framework
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We like to eat a lot of our peppers fresh and as a result a long harvest period is highly desirable. We also use peppers a lot to make sauces and ketchups and so we want our main harvest period to mirror that of our tomatoes, which contribute to the same preserves. The remainder of our harvest is frozen, so it doesn’t matter when that arrives.
Although Debbie and I don’t really eat green peppers, we have lots of friends and family who do, so we also don’t mind a late crop either.