There are many fine pepper varieties, with different offerings every year in catalogues. Best select those that appeal to you, according to their description. Use my photos for ideas too.

• If your climate has a summer cooler than the ideal, which is the case for much of the UK, it’s important to remember that the photos of highly coloured peppers are achievable only in warm conditions.

Bell peppers are almost rectangular in shape, with a thick skin, and the harvest can be heavy. Often they are available as hybrids, such as Bell Boy and Bendigo.

Hungarian Hot Wax grows pointed peppers, unusual for being of variable heat, some mild and some spicy.

Roter Augsburger grows well in cooler conditions but, if it’s windy, growth is not worthwhile – see the photo in ‘Planting’ below. The fruits are medium-sized, slightly pointy and tasty when ripe red.

For chillies there are fun shapes to try as well as a range of colours and heat units. Bishops Hat is a beautiful fruit, Lemon Drop is easy to grow and of medium heat, Alphonso Loco makes a large plant with really hot, black-seeded chillies.

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• Seeds germinate in seven to ten days.

Sowing time

Seeds and seedlings need warmth, and the plants require a long season of growth. Therefore you must have options for indoor sowing, as early as the middle of February and up to mid-March/late winter to early spring.

It is possible to sow for another month after that, always with good warmth and light.

Sowing method

It can be two weeks or more between sowing and full development of the cotyledons. This makes it worthwhile to sow in a small tray, so that less of your warm space is needed for those first two to three weeks. Then prick out the seedlings into module cells, after two to three weeks in the seed tray.

Pot on?

This is necessary in order to keep plants growing to a respectable size, until it is warm enough to plant them out. The slow growth means that a 7 cm/3 in pot is probably large enough. Then, if not ready to transplant after three weeks, you can pot this into a 10 cm/4 in pot.

Transplant size and time

Plants can be 20–30 cm/8–12 inches tall, and they may even have a first flower or two. Plant out at your normal time for warmth-loving plants, after the last frost of spring.

Transplant method

Use a trowel to make a hole slightly larger than the rootball and 5 cm/2 in deeper, and push in firmly.

For container growing, a 30 cm/12 in pot should be large enough for one pepper plant. Chillies can grow in a smaller pot.

Spacing

If your summer is hot, the pepper plants can grow large and need up to 60 cm/24 in each way. For cooler summers, 45 cm/18 in works fine.

Chilli plants can be as close as 35 cm/14 in apart.

Support

Even for commercial growers, this can be a vexing question. It is possible to grow pepper plants as cordons, with two leading stems per plant.

However, this involves a lot of time, removing sideshoots very regularly. Pepper plants grow more sideshoots than tomatoes, partly because there is a shorter distance between the nodes of each main leaf.

I find it simplest to put a stout bamboo in the soil, close to the main stem. Let the plant grow as it wishes and loop a string around later, once you notice branches drooping with the weight of developing peppers. Occasionally a branch may snap off because they are fragile at the joint with the main stem.

• Find the way that works best for you and according to how much time you have.
• There is some support needed for most pepper plants.
• Chillies, on the other hand, rarely need support because the fruits are so much lighter and plants are more compact.

Chilli plants need little water because of their slow growth and small size. Pepper plants in hot conditions need less water than, say, aubergines – perhaps twice a week and with a decent amount each time.

Use a trowel to check soil moisture – remember that it’s fine when only the surface is dry. If it’s also dry lower down, give plenty of water.

• Container-grown pepper plants need water every day once they are growing strongly.
• Chilli plants in containers outside may need water as little as once every five days in damp weather.
• Water chilli and pepper plants less, once most of the fruits are showing signs of colour.

Extra mulch to retain moisture?

This is rarely needed, except in arid conditions.

Fruit thinning is not needed because these plants sort it themselves. The main time you need to reduce growth is six to eight weeks before first frost, when it’s good to pinch off all new growth which usually has flower buds. They would not have time to grow into worthwhile fruits.

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How to judge readiness

You have more choices here than for most harvests. What we call unripe peppers and chillies are edible. It’s a question of how you like to eat them.

• With peppers, the main difference is extra sweetness once they have changed colour.
• The original colour is not always green; on some varieties, it may be beige or purple.

How to pick

Use a sharp knife to cut through the stalk of a pepper that you want to pick. It is possible to lift peppers sharply upwards to detach them. However, this can sometimes break the plant stem.

Chilli stalks detach more easily and can be picked simply by pulling upwards to detach them.

When to pick and how often

This mainly depends on how ripe you like them to be. For fully ripe/coloured peppers in a temperate climate, it can mean waiting until early autumn before taking any harvest at all. As a result, we often eat green peppers and pick just a few, so that there are a few to ripen in time.

Chillies are good to pick on demand, with a big harvest by mid-autumn when they are mostly coloured and leaves are often yellowing.

Storing

Peppers keep for three or four weeks in cool conditions, and if picked green but fully developed they may start to show some colour after a week or two. They will be less sweet than if ripened on the plant.

Chillies store well, even when picked green, for at least a month and more in winter. You can also store them in a jar with some oil, which then becomes very hot.

Saving seed

The flowers of all these plants will cross-pollinate. Even peppers and chillies can cross so, if you want to save seed, best grow just one variety or keep it where insects won’t find other varieties nearby.

For chillies at least, it’s more realistic to keep a pruned plant over winter, as I describe above in the section on container growing. You can also do this with pepper plants but you need more space and a larger pot because they are bigger.

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Aphids in spring are often on new and tender growth.

I advise not to worry, just spray or jet a little water to keep them in check and, once conditions become warmer and lighter, plants grow more strongly with less interest for aphids. Also, predator insects arrive by early summer.

Slugs eat weak seedlings and peppers close to ground level. They should not be a problem if you transplant once it’s warm and keep developing peppers above ground level.

Weedkiller in compost

I hope that most people will not be troubled by this but it’s present if your plants show deformities of growth, with particular shrivelling at the growing points or tips, sometimes together with paler leaves. There are probably weedkillers in the compost you have used.

There was, for example, a totally new incidence of this in Melbourne, Australia, in December 2020. The compost from a large recycling facility caused damage in hundreds of gardens. When the company analysed the compost, they were horrified to find traces of dicamba, 2,4-D, MCPA, triclopyr and picloram.

It turns out that much of this came from grass clippings brought to the facility for composting, from lawns sprayed with weedkiller that contains these horrible ingredients, including clopyralid. There is no way that the company could check every delivery of material to compost.

• These products need to be banned.
• Pyralids in particular can remain active in compost for many years and are dissipated only by soil microbes, not compost microbes.

If this should happen to you, check out this link on Twitter, where you can make a comment to alert other people about the source of your compost.

Clear

Use a trowel or sharp knife to cut around the main roots, just below the stem. Some twisting will help to break any remaining roots and leave most of them in the ground.

If you have grown plants in containers and don’t want to overwinter them, pull them out and drop the compost on any bed in the garden, or use it for winter salad plants.

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