Hot Peppers For Chilly Climates

All gardeners know that peppers like it hot, hot, hot. But that doesn't mean you can't grow these zesty beauties in your northern New England garden. Like most everything else that thrives in hot weather and long growing seasons, you have to be crafty to grow hot peppers in a cold climate.

Pick the right pepper and you can pick them by the peck straight into fall. Choose varieties with fewer days to maturity, 70 or less. There are dozens of varieties that fall into this category and range from mild to three alarm.

Start you pepper plants indoors early, 6-8 weeks before you would set them out. Give them plenty of light. A soil-warming unit helps boost germination, but I've had good luck without one. Once the plants are a couple of inches high, begin feeding them every other day with a very dilute solution of liquid fertilizer, preferably 10-10-10. Very dilute means that you only put enough in to barely color the water. Move your pepper plants to larger pots at least twice while they are indoors.

Don't bother to move peppers outdoors before June in our area. It's just too stinking cold and damp for peppers in May. Prepare the soil before planting with a liberal sprinkling of a high phosphorus, low nitrogen fertilizer. You want fruits, not leaves. High nitrogen will make the plant nice and bushy, but won't do much for fruit set. Then lay down a dark mulch. I like to use black planter's paper or IRT plastic mulch. Do this about a week before setting out the plants to warm the soil.

I've fooled my peppers into thinking they are in a hotter place by planting them along the edge of my asphalt driveway. The blacktop absorbs heat, creating a cozy microclimate. Keep you pepper plants well watered and they should produce that proverbial peck before frost.

Short season peppers in the mild range include: Hungarian Yellow Wax (65 days) an old standby; Anaheim (68 days) a mild and meaty pepper; Italian Roaster Hybrid (70 days) barely hot and good for pizzas; Robustini (62 days) a pepperoncini type, like those found on salad bars (http://www.superseeds.com); and Big Chile Hybrid (68 days) a huge chile that is much milder than a Jalepeno.

For the more adventurous: Senorita (60 days) a fairly pungent Jalepeno type; Thai Hot Dragon (70 days) the name says it all; Firecracker Piquin Chile (66 days) fiery hot with very pretty purple fruits ripening to red (http://www.shepherdseeds.com); Cherry Bomb (65 days) very hot small round pepper (http://www.veseys.com); Trifetti (60 days) tiny pungent fruit with pretty variegated foliage- grow this one in a container and bring it in when the weather cools off.

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