Bell peppers are a cooking staple and a great addition to any garden. They can yield fruits in great abundance if cared for properly and can be used straight off the plant throughout the year. First harvest can come up in as few as 65 days from seed, so they’re not even a huge time commitment for what they provide.
Bell Pepper Details:
- Family: Solanaceae
- Growing Season: Early to late spring depending on your climate
- Growing Zones: 3 through 10, planting shifts later and later as climates get colder
- Spacing: 14-16 inches (35-40 cm) apart
- Seed to Harvest time: 65 to 70 days, planted as seedlings
- Indoor Starting: Start indoors 8 to 10 weeks before final frost, transplant seedlings outdoors after danger of frost.
- Earliest Planting: After danger of frost
- Watering: Water when soil is dry, keeping soil moist, but never wet. Do not over water. Up to 2 inches of water weekly in healthy soil.
- Sunlight Requirements: Full sun
- Planting: plant starters in well fertilized and composted soil. Do not plant in soil that has grown peppers, tomatoes, or potatoes the previous year without fertilizer and compost.
- Weeding: Well established bell peppers can tolerate some small weeds, but will yield smaller fruits with longer time to harvest.
- Harvesting: Cut peppers slightly above the top of the fruit with garden clippers. Do not pull peppers from the plant as this can damage the plant and reduce future yields. Ripeness can be determined by pepper color, but varies from species to species, so be sure to check harvesting notes for your specific variety.
- Known Pests: Aphids, use soap and water to wash aphids from outdoor plants and introduce lady bugs if they are permissible in your state/country. Blossom end rot, reduce number of peppers on the plant and add minor calcium enrichment to the soil or remove competing plants from nearby. Cucumber mosaic virus, pull and trash plant – do not compost – don’t plant susceptible plant varieties into the same soil for at least 1 year.
More About Bell Peppers
The bell pepper, also known as the sweet pepper, is perhaps the most common of all household peppers eaten in the united states. While it is loves worldwide, it finds more use in warmer climates where it is more easily grown.
Bell peppers sometimes surprise people when they find out that these are also paprika! Paprika is simply another name for the bell pepper, but typically in the US the names are divided into the use of the fresh pepper and the spice separately.
Despite being in the genus Capsium bell peppers do not produce capsaicin which is the spicy compound you may know from other peppers.
While bell peppers come in many different varieties and colors, the flavor between them does not actually change much or at all with the color of the peppers. If a recipe calls for green peppers in the US they are just referring to bell peppers. The only difference noted from color is the vitamin content. Red bell peppers tend to contain twice the vitamin C to that of green bell peppers.
Bell Pepper Tasting and Food Notes
Bell peppers have a mild sweet taste with grassy earthy notes. The sweetness is often cut slightly when roasting, but the distinct sweet pepper flavor tends to remain no matter how long they are cooked. This makes them great for stir fry as well as an addition to breakfast foods.
Another component of what makes bell peppers great in the kitchen is that they can be eaten both raw and cooked. This allows for their use to a particular person’s taste and can help if you want to add some texture to a dish.
Bell peppers are relatively nutritious, but are 95% water so you’re not getting a lot of nutrients in each pepper.
Beyond their use as a component on their own, they can be dried and processed into paprika powder which is a base seasoning for hundreds of dishes. This is one of the primary components of most taco seasonings as well as many European dishes that center around the spice as the main tasting note. Paprika can be prepared in many different ways, but typically it is used in one of two varieties. Sweet paprika is a simpler preparation and preserves some of the lighter notes of the pepper. Smoked paprika adds the smokier notes that you might find from char roasting a pepper and can help to develop a stronger flavor profile in food. No matter which type of paprika you use, it is sure to be a solid addition to most applicable dishes.
Green peppers pair well with most leafy greens when raw, but pair better with meats as they are cooked. Traditionally bell peppers don’t go well with fish or other seafood, but don’t let us stop you from trying them with fish tacos!
Should I Grow Bell Peppers?
Bell peppers are a good choice for gardens that have soil and space to do proper yearly crop rotation or compost additions. Because bell peppers are greedy plants you will need to ensure your soil can handle them after the first year. Failure to handle the soil depletion issues that come with peppers (or tomatoes, potatoes, or other peppers) can lead to smaller yields year after year and eventually issues like blossom end rot.
On the other hand, if you are prepared to rotate your crops, bell peppers are a fantastic introduction to plants that require a little more patience and care. Peppers are one of the plants you can add to your garden that do exceptionally well with specific pruning and additional care. If you’re interested in trying out bell peppers but don’t want to loose a slot in your garden for something that might not turn out for you, we recommend that you give them a try in a pot of container garden first. If you end up liking the slightly more work to get bigger yields, then they’re a shoe in for your main garden after that!