by Lisa Giroday, Sandra Lopuch and Sam Philips | Ever grown peppers in our climate? It’s a rewarding endeavour and, for dwellers with patios, they can be grown in containers. Their vegetative growth is more compact and slow growing than tomatoes (their red-coloured friends from the nightshade family).

Our favourite tried and true cultivar to grow in the garden is the Hungarian Hot Wax. It’s on the hot side, but it won’t send you into a fit if you bite into it raw (that, of course, is completely subjective). It can be harvested when yellow or harvested when it further ripens to a vibrant red. When peppers are left to ripen further on the plant, their Vitamin C content boosts significantly. These little compact plants can produce about 20+ peppers and are quite hardy in our climate. They can also be dried for use in the winter months.

This summer has been amazing for peppers and, when the season is good, hot peppers are one of our top garden treasures. And hot peppers tend to do better in cooler summers than their sweet pepper counterparts. If you find your peppers are not ripening up once the weather cools significantly (nearing first frost), pull out the whole plant and hang it in a warm, dry place to ripen up.

A few keys things to remember for next season: start your peppers early, indoors. We start ours in late February to early March to get them to a good stage of development before setting them outside (once the night time temperatures hit a consistent 12 degrees Celsius). We wait until June as a general rule. Regular harvesting encourages more fruit production. Pepper companions include basil, marigolds, and short varieties of sunflowers.

Use hot peppers – well, anywhere you want some heat in your culinary life, y’know? We love hot peppers at breakfast time in eggs, in a pickle recipe, in a summer marinara sauce; you name it.

THE VICTORY GARDENS ARCHIVE

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Victory Gardens is a team of local urban farmers for hire. Lisa, Sandra and Sam help transform tired or underused residential and commercial green spaces into food producing gardens. Their goal is to challenge the way communities use space and to participate in the change needed to consume food more sustainably. For the rest of the growing season, they’ve hooked up with Scout to share some cool tips and tricks on how to get the best from of our own backyards.