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Enticing catalogs warm icy outdoors
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Ornamental peppers have an array of eye-popping colors on a single plant.
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Published: January 31, 2009
Fourteen degrees. Eleven degrees.
These are the mornings when the mailperson, gloved and earmuffed, brings the seed catalogs. Days when the wind howls and the ground, should you brave walking on it, crunches and breaks beneath your feet.
Not in the catalogs. Every day is June 15 there, 75 degrees with a few high, puffy clouds.
After a few hours with the catalogs, I can convince myself that my mostly shady garden space has transformed into a 3-acre truck farm with a climate similar to Southern California. This is the path that lust for vegetables will lead you down. Just fill out the order form and don't look out the window.
This year it is peppers that have taken me by the hand and led me down that perilous path. Peppers are easy to grow, requiring mostly sun and patience, two qualities that I sorely lack, but as I have alluded, seed ordering involves a bit of denial. There is an abundance of peppers proffered this season.
For the price of one pepper
Sweet bell peppers are expensive in the grocery store and a pleasure to pick from the late-summer garden. Burpees offers Carnival Mix , a packet of 50 seeds that includes Big Red, Chardonnay, Purple Beauty, Orange Sun, Diamond and Sunbright, a combination that yields white, orange, green, red, yellow and purple sweet bell peppers in one packet for $3.75, a little more than the cost of a good size sweet bell pepper in midwinter. Thompson and Morgan offers a similar mix called Sweet Pepper Summer Salad -- a good way to deal with indecision.
Seed Savers Exchange carries a Chocolate Beauty bell that turns from shiny green to rich chocolate brown. It doesn't taste like chocolate, though. They also have Bull Nose Large Bell, a variety that was grown by Thomas Jefferson at Monticello. Plants are productive and sturdy, and fruit ripens green to red. John Scheepers Kitchen Garden Seeds has Blushing Beauty Bell Peppers described this way: "her gleaming fruits droop sinuously from lush, deep green foliage in all colors from delicate ivory to blush to deep red." Whoa, I thought this was a family paper.
Most of the seed catalogs this year are offering some version of a miniature bell pepper that can be eaten right off the plant like a cherry tomato if you don't mind the seeds, or split, scooped out and stuffed with cream cheese for a bite-sized appetizer. Miniature bells can also be baked or stuffed and pickled. The fruits are multicolored and only 2 inches, and the plants are short and stocky, about a foot and a half.
Bells are not the only sweet pepper, though. There are bull's horn peppers of Italian origin (corno di toro) and the long cylinderlike Cubanelle types such as Biscayne. Pimento peppers are sweet and thick-walled, and Paprika varieties such as Alma Paprika can be dried and ground to make this spice. Paprika generally has a touch of heat. Thin-walled and slender peppers are often used for frying, whereas thick-walled peppers are best for stuffing and baking.
Hot peppers are rated on a scale from 0 to 5; the sweet pepper is a 0; the Habenero is a 5. Jalapenos fall about midway on the scale. Poblanos are also in the 3 range. These peppers are called Poblano when deep green and fresh, and Ancho when red and dried. They are used in mole sauce when dried, and are the peppers of chile relleno when roasted green.
Burpees has a little 18-inch- tall jalapeno that it says has almost no heat and may win the catalog Clever Name of the Year: It's called False Alarm.
The catalogs are full of ornamental peppers now, plants that seems to be coming into their own -- for good reason. They are easy to care for, terrifically productive and very colorful. Many are compact and make good container subjects. Many of the ornamental peppers are edible -- if you don't mind burning holes in the lining of your esophagus. They usually fall in the 3-to-5 range on the heat scale.
Gardeners could devote substantial space to all the ornamental peppers available this year. Purple Flash has deep black-green leaves splashed with white and lavender variegation and little globe-shaped fruit.
Prairie Fire has pointy upright fruits of red, yellow, orange and red. I've already mentioned in this column the Black Pearl pepper, whose dark foliage is topped with clusters of shiny, black, marble-size fruit that gradually turn a deep red. Bolivian Rainbow has tiny pointed fruit that changes from purple to yellow and then red.
Pepper plants are easy to get started from seed. Give them about eight to 10 weeks from sowing the seed to transplanting to the garden. Peppers like warm soil, and you should plan to transplant once the danger of frost has passed and the soil has warmed, usually in May. Peppers will sulk if moved into soil that is too cool. Start them in small pots or flats filled with potting soil and transplant to 4-inch pots when the plants have two sets of true leaves. Keep them in bright light to maintain stocky plants.
Good catalogs list the days to maturity for each variety. In the case of peppers, this means the time from when you transplant to the garden to the time you will see fruit. A quick perusal of the catalog shows this time to generally be 70 to 90 days.
You don't have to love eating peppers to love growing these beautiful plants. The hard part is deciding which ones.
■ If you have a gardening question or story idea, write to David Bare in care of Features, Winston-Salem Journal, P.O. Box 3159, Winston-Salem, NC 27101-3159, or send e-mail to his attention to gardening@wsjournal.com.
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