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Welcome to growing your own chili peppers. You are entering a world that can be as basic as a child covering a seed with dirt to electronic monitoring and computer controlled greenhouse environments. This page is devoted to something somewhere in-between those extremes but don't let me stop you from being super simple or massively complex in your efforts.

What I offer here is some basic chili pepper gardening facts and a way of growing chilies in containers that will provide you with a personal supply of mean nasty hot that will last you all year long through the winter until you have the next years harvest on your plate.

There are as many ways to grow chilies in containers as there are people to try out the technique. You can use my instructions verbatim or you can take an idea presented here and run with it using your own variation. You will find that the climate in which you live directly affects the results. Chilies love hot climates, if you don't live in one or you cannot provide your plants with full sunlight all day long then you will not have results as good as mine and should vary your planting accordingly. I live in Southern California near a desert putting me in a Climate Zone of 9 according to the Sunset Western Garden Book.


Scientific Name: Solanaceae
Annuals
All Zones
Full Sun
Infrequent, deep watering during growth

All peppers grow on 1 1/2 to 2-ft.-tall handsome, bushy plants. Use plants as temporary low informal hedge, or grow and display them in containers. The two basic kinds of peppers are sweet and hot.

Sweet peppers always remain mild, even when flesh ripens to red. This group includes big stuffing and salad peppers commonly known as bell peppers, best known of these are 'California Wonder' and 'Yolo Wonder'. Hybrid varieties have been bred for early bearing, high yield, or disease resistance. Big peppers are also available in bright yellow and purple (purple types turn green when cooked). Other sweet types are thick-walled, very sweet pimientos used in salads or for cooking or canning; sweet cherry peppers for pickling; and long, slender -Italian frying peppers and Hungarian sweet yellow peppers, both used for cooking.

Hot peppers range from tiny (pea-size) types to narrow, 6-7-in.-long forms, but all are pungent, their flavor ranging from the mild heat of Italian peperoncini to the near-incandescence of the 'Habanero'. 'Anaheim' is a mild but spicy pepper used for making canned green chilies. 'Long Red Cayenne' is used for drying; 'Hungarian Yellow Wax (Hot)', 'Jalapeno', and 'Fresno Chile Grande' are used for pickling. Mexican cooking utilizes an entire palette of peppers, among them 'Ancho', 'Mulato', and 'Pasilla'.

Buy started plants at nursery, or sow seed indoors 8-10 weeks before average date of last frost. Set out when weather becomes warm, spacing plants 11/-2 ft. apart. Feed once or twice with commercial fertilizer after plants become established, before blossoms set. Sweet peppers are ready to pick when they have reached good size but keep their flavor until red ripe. Pimientos should be picked only when red-ripe. Pick hot peppers when they are fully ripe. Control cutworms with baits. Control aphids, whiteflies with all-purpose vegetable garden dust or spray.
More at the above site.