🥕 Vegetable

How to Grow Pepper (Bell & Sweet)

Capsicum annuum

Needs warmth to start — transplant after last frost when soil is warm. Peppers that ripen on the plant taste dramatically sweeter than those picked green.

Harvest

70 Days

Sunlight

full

Watering

moderate

Medium

In-Ground

Spacing

2 sq ft

Varieties of Pepper (Bell & Sweet)

Pick the form that fits your garden

Heritage & Origins

Native Region

South and Central America (Mexico, Guatemala)

Historical Context

“All peppers — from the mildest bell to the fieriest ghost — descend from wild Capsicum plants domesticated in what is now Mexico and Guatemala around 6,000 BCE, making them one of the oldest cultivated crops in the Americas. Columbus brought pepper seeds back to Spain and renamed them 'pimiento' after confusing them with Piper nigrum (black pepper), a different plant entirely. The spice trade was partly driven by European attempts to grow and monopolize New World peppers. In the American South, bell peppers became a defining ingredient of Creole cooking, especially after the Haitian Revolution brought refugee cooks to New Orleans.”

Ancestral Meaning

In Korean cooking, gochugaru (crushed red pepper) is so fundamental it has its own tradition — families roast and grind peppers together each fall, and the smell of it cooking is one of the most potent triggers of autumn in Korea. In Hungarian cuisine, paprika made from a specific sweet pepper variety became a national identity marker after a flood in Szeged destroyed the pepper crop and motivated the breeding of indoor-adapted varieties. Growing peppers connects you to a spice history that crossed oceans and changed hands dozens of times before arriving at your kitchen.

💡

Did you know? The heat in hot peppers comes from capsaicin, a compound that tricks the body into thinking it's experiencing actual heat — the body responds by releasing endorphins, which is why people describe eating hot peppers as a 'rush.' A bell pepper contains zero capsaicin; a ghost pepper (bhut jolokia) contains roughly 200 times more.

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