Peppers
Bell pepper
Pick green through the gap; fall grows the color.
- Indoors
- 6 to 8 wk (Jan, again May)
- Outside
- Mid Mar to mid Apr, again Jul 1-25
- Where
- Raised bed or in ground
- Sun
- Full sun
- Water
- Deep weekly soak; swings mean blossom end rot
- Harvest
- Jun green; Oct to Nov colored
Care
- Water
- Deeply and about weekly, early-morning water, kept even; bells read every swing as blossom end rot. Mulch so one missed watering does not show up on the fruit.
- Sow
- 2 seeds a quarter inch deep per cell, cut the weaker at the soil line when true leaves show. Spring bench in January; a second bench in May for the fall bed.
- Start inside
- Heat mat at 80 to 90F, sprouts in a week to two; give bells the full 6 to 8 weeks, since small sturdy transplants catch up and leggy ones never do. Out mid-March to mid-April in 65F soil; fall transplants July 1 to 25.
- Feed
- Compost at planting and one side-dress at fruit set, then ease off the nitrogen. No feeding in the July-August heat; the fall bed gets a light feed when set resumes.
- Ready
- Full size and firm is good picked green from June; full color costs weeks more on the plant. The fall crop is where the color comes from, ripening through October and early November as the nights cool.
- Trouble
- Sunken brown patch at the blossom end: uneven water, so soak deeply and evenly. Flowers drop through the gap and reset when nights cool. Loaded branches snap in a storm: stake early. Big-fruited sweets suffer most in the heat, so pick green through the worst of it.
In a bag?
- Yes
- Up to a 5–7 gal bag.
- Water
- Daily all summer, twice a day in a heat wave, until it runs from the drainage holes; afternoon shade or 30 to 50 percent shade cloth is part of the deal.
- Feed
- Dilute liquid feed on the watering calendar with a weekly plain-water leach; hold the feed when days top 90F.
- Sow
- One plant per 5 gallon bag at the minimum, staked; the fall bag is the one that colors.
Sweet bells grow here on the Texas pepper schedule, spring and fall. The honest catch: big-fruited types suffer most when the summer fruit-set gap hits.
Growing
Same bench as every pepper here: January on the heat mat, out from mid-March to mid-April in 65F soil, and loaded with fruit before mid-June. Through the gap, pick green instead of nursing color on a plant that has stopped setting; the pods still eat well. The May bench transplants July 1 to 25, and the fall crop is the color crop, ripening red and gold through October into early November ahead of the mid-November frost.
Varieties
The state sheet names Bell Tower, Big Bertha, California Wonder, Gypsy, Jupiter and Yolo Wonder for Texas; any of them is the right packet. Bell Tower is an older strain and can be hard to find in catalogs; if you cannot, any blocky bell does the same job.
In the kitchen
The mild end of the salsa range: diced raw into pico for crunch with no burn, charred and peeled for the freezer, or stuffed. The red and gold ones rarely make it into the house whole.