How to Grow Peppers
Growing Peppers = Easy!
Growing peppers is simple, and a colorful, nutritious and tasty addition to your vegetable garden. Peppers grow best in hot gardening climates, but with a little work peppers can also be grown in other climates.
For Growing Peppers:
- Well drained soil.
- Plenty of sunshine.
- Soil enriched with compost, well rotted manure, or fertilizer.
- Support for the plants (such as small stakes) is helpful, but not required.
How to Grow Peppers
- Test the soil. Garden soil with a pH level of 5.5-7.0 is best for growing peppers. (Improve the soil, if necessary.)
- After danger of frost has passed, plant the pepper plant seedlings in the vegetable garden soil. Dig holes in the soil that are a foot and a half apart, and deep enough that you can place the plant, up to just below the first set of leaves. Place the seedlings gently in the hole, and fill up to ground level with soil mixed with compost and a little bone-meal.
- Water well after planting, and keep the soil evenly moist (but not sopping wet) throughout the growing season.
- Place a thick layer of organic mulch around the plants, extending several inches out from the base of the plant. This helps the soil retain moisture and keeps the weeds away from the pepper plants shallow root system.
- Once there are blooms growing on the pepper plants, water once with a dose of liquid fertilizer (compost tea, liquid kelp, fish emulsion, etc.). If needed, you can repeat this fertilizer application monthly.
- Harvest peppers frequently, as fruit left on the vine too long will slow the plant's production.
If your peppers are still growing when fall's frost approaches, you can cover the plants nightly (old sheets work great for this), and uncover in the morning. It's a little extra work, but extends your harvest season & the remaining peppers will ripen up until the day-time temperatures cool significantly or there's a hard frost.