Fruit vegetables
Sweet pepper
Capsicum annuum
Timings for your region
Suggested: Moderate · Explained in the glossary
Start indoorsmid February – late March
Plantingmid May – early June
Harvestmid July – early October
Practical tip
Needs warmth to germinate — below 22 °C nothing happens for weeks. Picked green the plant keeps producing; left to ripen red it tastes sweeter.
Origin & history
The sweet pepper comes from Central and South America and reached Spain with Columbus in 1493; it carried the name “pepper” from the start because it was traded as a substitute for costly black pepper. The mild, thick-walled vegetable peppers, by contrast, are a European breeding achievement, above all from Hungary and the Balkans in the 18th and 19th centuries. Botanically the sweet pepper is the same species as most chillies — the difference lies purely in the breeding.
Varieties
Blocky peppers, the thick four-lobed supermarket type, need the most heat and the longest season and often disappoint outdoors. Pointed and snack peppers with smaller, thinner-walled fruit finish considerably earlier and are the safe choice outside; look for “early” or a short growing period on the packet. Which final colour a variety actually reaches is stated in its description — green is only a stage on the way. If you save your own seed, keep it away from flowering chillies: insects cross the two, and the offspring can turn out hot.
Care
Peppers want warmth and shelter: a south-facing wall, a greenhouse, or a pot of ten litres or more that you can move when it turns cold. Side-shooting them like tomatoes is wrong here — peppers carry their crop precisely on the side shoots; only the shoots below the first fork come off. Do not forget a cane, as the branches snap easily under the weight of the fruit. Water evenly and feed regularly from the first fruit set.
What can go wrong
When flowers drop one after another without setting fruit it is nearly always temperature: cold nights below about 12 °C, or midday heat above 35 °C in a greenhouse. Fleece on cool nights, shading and ventilation on hot days fix it — feeding does not. In dry greenhouse or indoor air, spider mites and aphids sit on the undersides of the leaves; turn the leaves over weekly, do not let the air get bone dry, and keep newly bought plants apart at first. A sunken black patch at the tip of a fruit is blossom end rot and the result of uneven watering, not a pathogen.
Harvest, storage & kitchen
Cut the fruit off with a piece of stalk rather than pulling it — otherwise the whole shoot comes away with it. Clear the plants before the first frost: fruit that has already begun to change colour will finish doing so at room temperature, deep green fruit stays green. Store at 8 to 10 °C and no colder; in the fridge peppers develop soft, sunken spots. Cut into strips they freeze well raw, and fully coloured fruit can be roasted in the oven and skinned.
All timings are guide values for the given climate, not a guarantee. Weather, aspect and variety all have a say.