Outdoor peppers - worth the effort?
 

Hi,

reviewing the results from last year before planning what to grow this year.

The outdoor cherry tomatoes were an unqualified success - kilos of fruit
from two plants plus a couple of offshoots. Also a very long cropping
season.

The chilli plant also produced hundreds of reasonably hot chillis - I am now
stocked up for a year or so with dried chillis.

The pepper plant produced about a dozen edible peppers through the whole
season.
Given that we eat on average at least one pepper per day this didn't make a
massive dent in our purchasing of peppers.
The fruits were also slow to ripen and quite thin walled compared to
commercial stuff.
The plant is outside at the moment with some partially ripened fruit - I did
bring it into the sun room but the masses of (white?) fly on the inside of
the windows plus the sap dripping on the floor was not a success.
Also plagued by caterpillars (some eating their way out of the fruit, I
think) so all in all not a spectacular result.

So what does the team think?
Do others get a reasonable crop from peppers,
do you grow a number of outdoor plants,
are they best suited to greenhouse growing,
or are they like full size (as opposed to cherry) tomatoes in that when they
finally begin to produce the grocery shelves are full of tomatoes which are
biger and cheaper?

I gave up growing outdoor full sized tomatoes because they only cropped when
the commercial supply was plentiful and cheap, whereas there is still a
premium charged for cherry tomatoes.

I should mention that everything will be grown on a south facing patio, as
the garden is full of lawn, shrubs and fruit trees and so currently has no
room for a vegetable plot.

TIA
Dave R
--

Outdoor peppers - worth the effort?
 

On Fri, 30 Jan 2004 09:20:07 -0000, "David W.E. Roberts"
wrote:

The pepper plant produced about a dozen edible peppers through the whole
season.
Given that we eat on average at least one pepper per day this didn't make a
massive dent in our purchasing of peppers.
The fruits were also slow to ripen and quite thin walled compared to
commercial stuff.

I have read that the relative fruitfulness(?) of sweet/bell peppers
can be affected for a whole season if they're set out early and
experience temperatures lower than 55F (13C). They *really* like warm
conditions. I never counted the number I got from a single plant in
hot, steamy Tidewater, but am pretty sure even here one plant wouldn't
have supplied 1 fruit per day. I've grown a number of varieties (I
like trying the different colored ones that are so expensive in shops)
and had quite different results. 'Golden Summer,' a yellow bell, was
prolific, thick-walled, and one of my favorites. 'Purple Beauty' was
most disappointing -- thin-walled and not at all vigorous.

Even in this climate, the plants are of modest size and much less
productive in terms of number and time than, say, tomatoes. If I had a
half-dozen fruit on one 'bush' at one time, I'd count myself lucky.
With a long growing season and several plants, I had as many as I
could use.