Every garden should have at least one hot and one sweet pepper. Peppers are easy to grow and aren’t really bothered by pests or diseases.
The worst thing that ever happened to my peppers was the blossoms dropped off without forming fruit. No problem. Just use a small paintbrush to manually pollinate the flowers. It jumpstarts the pepper plant and it begins to grow lots of peppers!
Sometimes peppers won’t keep their blossoms and make fruit if they’re watered too much. If this happens to your peppers, hold back on watering, except for what Mother Nature provides, and watch the fruits form.
Peppers should receive a weak solution of liquid fertilizer every other week. Too much fertilizer causes the leaves to grow lush at the expense of setting fruit.
Don’t forget to pick regularly. If you leave the first few peppers on the plant to turn red it may stop producing. Pick the first three or four peppers while they’re still green and leave the later ones to ripen to red, yellow, orange or whatever color they will eventually turn. Pepper plants make a lot of fruit so they’ll be plenty.
I’ve found peppers to be one of the most forgiving vegetables in the garden. They’re perfect for the beginner and also do very well in pots. As long as you give peppers a super rich soil they’ll even give you a few fruits in partial shade. But peppers love hot weather so they’ll do much better in full sun.
Here’s to the mouth-tingling delight of hot peppers!
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