Pepper Ideas, Tips & Guides

There are many foods and ingredients that illicit strong opinions among eaters, often based on one unpleasant sensory experience due to poor preparation and not the food itself. Okra, a mucilaginous member of the Mallow family, is no stranger.

Learn all about How to Grow Jalapeños in Pots and relish them fresh in smoothies, smoke them in dishes, toss in pizzas, add in tacos, omelets, and much more!

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The title of this article may sound absurd to you, and if you’re offended–you may declare that we’re posting rubbish content these days. You can even suggest us to change our Editor (We got a new editor recently). But believe it or not, human urine can be of great use in the garden.

Surveying the aftermath of the Kula Upcountry Fire—one of three devastating wildfires that raged across Maui last month—Brendan Balthazar noticed a striking pattern emerge across his cattle ranch. Peppered throughout some 500 acres of charred pastureland, he found sizable patches of grass left unscathed by the blaze.

Hybrid fruits and vegetables are the result of crossbreeding between two different cultivars. The goal of hybrid vegetable or fruit hybrids is to create a new cultivar or hybrid with the best traits of the parent plants. This means that hybridized vegetables and plants often have many benefits over open-pollinated crops. The list of hybridized crops is lengthy, so we’ve compiled our own list of the top six hybrid plants to try in your garden.

Peperomia Rosso is a beautiful and easy-to-care-for houseplant that can brighten up any indoor space. This growing guide provides helpful tips and advice for keeping your plants healthy and thriving.

Explore the fiery world of Carolina Reaper, the hottest pepper on Earth. Learn the art of cultivating this intense chili with our expert guide, from sowing seeds to reaping the heat. Discover the secrets to successful growth and harness the power of this ultimate spicy experience.

As we enter fall and the pumpkin spice latte returns, it only makes sense to gain inspiration from the beloved seasonal drink to decorate our homes.

Growing hot peppers? Actually, a short-living perennial in tropical and subtropical areas (USDA Zones 9-11), this productive vegetable can live for a couple of years. Also, with care in winter, growing hot peppers indoors is easy; some varieties can be grown as perennials in Zones 7 and 8.

Glidden

Basil is one of the easiest herbs to grow in the vegetable garden, herb garden, or kitchen window. The highly aromatic basil leaves protect other plants from pests and attract pollinators as well. The basil plant also prevents insects like Japanese beetles, bean beetles, and worms. Instead of requiring protection, basil helps its neighboring plants. Let’s have a look at the Basil Companion Plants. 

We all know that pineapples are green from the outside with yellow flesh inside. But What is Pink Pineapple? Well, let’s find out!

Many gardeners adore the tasty pods and numerous culinary applications of okra, a warm-season vegetable. However, like all plants, okra can benefit from the presence of other plants in the garden. In this article, we will explore some of the Best Companion Plants for Okra.

On my birthday this year I sowed seeds for some cool chillies – chilli varieties developed for flavour, not heat. Due to the garden not being ready, I wasn’t able to plant them out until the end of June. They had a west-facing spot, with plenty of afternoon sun and the warmth of the house wall behind them. Mostly they thrived, and were trouble-free plants. I had to stake them, and water them when I watered the rest of the garden, but for the most plant they got on with life without me.

I spent a lot of my childhood holidays on the Costa del Sol, soaking up the Andalucian atmosphere. When I went to secondary school I chose Spanish as my second language (French was compulsory!), and ever since then Spain has been in my blood. I love the culture, and the food, although not their obsession with all things pork. As an adult I even spent a week living with a Spanish family, a holiday filled with memorable meals. They were worried I would be fussy, but the only thing I turned down was squid cooked in its own ink.

Grafting is a time-honoured technique for growing fruit trees – it allows gardeners and farmers to choose both the variety of fruit they want to grow, and the rootstock they want to grow it on. You can even graft more than one variety of fruit onto one rootstock, giving you a ‘family’ tree that saves space and spreads the harvest time, or gives you both ‘cookers’ and ‘eaters’ from one tree. Grafting vegetables, on the other hand, is something relatively new that has burst onto the home gardening scene in the last few years. Last year T&M gave us the opportunity to grow the TomTato, a tomato plant grafted onto potato roots that grows both tomatoes and potatoes – catchily nicknamed the Ketchup ‘n’ fries plant. This year they have added a new dual-purpose plant to their range: the Egg & Chips plant grows both aubergines (AKA eggplant) and potatoes.

It’s at this time of year, I think, that a polytunnel or greenhouse really comes in handy in the garden. Over the summer it may just be a tangle of tomato vines – productive, but a space that you really only go in to keep up with the watering chore, or to harvest ripe tomatoes. You know you’re going to come out with green stains on your clothes and hands that smell funny – tomatoes are like that. Those tomatoes will hang on longer into the autumn than you thought they would, and by the time you’ve cleared out the polytunnel the season will be so far advanced that it will be cold and dark and your crop of overwintering salads will barely be growing – just marking time until the days are long enough for them to actually grow.

One of the first things I did in the garden last year, when we were still waiting for the hard landscaping to be finished, was to put some large, colourful planters into the front garden. To begin with they were planted with sweet peppers (actually cool chillies), but in the autumn I replanted them with their permanent contents, and they have become my container herb garden. Although they’re at the front of the house they are one of the easiest place to get to from the kitchen for a quick snip, and the paving means I can get there in my slippers…. This means I can, and do, just pop out to get a handful of fresh herbs, and we are starting to add more of them to our cooking.

By the end of last month, the paving was finished and I had planted my three front garden planters with peppers, bergamot and salvias for the summer. They’re coming along very nicely, and in fact the first cool chilli is appearing on one of my Fooled You plants.

I’m sure my parents didn’t know when they named me (and still don’t!), but Emma is the Tibetan word for a spice – the dried berries of Zanthoxylum species, more commonly known in the UK as Sichuan pepper. I really must replace the two species I had, which didn’t survive life on the allotment.

Things have been a bit quiet here of late, as we have been working on the garden rather than enjoying it – it was time for the new sheds (yes, there’s more than one!) to arrive, and they had to be painted and assembled. Now that they’re here, we have more storage space, which meant we could order a new toy, something I’d been longing for since we saw one at the Eden Project in spring.

Today is World Kitchen Garden Day, a day for gardeners everywhere to celebrate their homegrown food. I thought you might like to see my peppers, which are doing very nicely in the planters at the front of the house. They’re covered in flowers and fruit, although it will be a while before any of the peppers ripen fully.

The barbecue doesn’t need to be the preserve of meat – quality vegetable kebabs go down a treat with meat eaters and herbivores, they just require a bit of time and imagination. The halloumi adds some bite and additional texture, going beautifully crispy on the outside and gooey on the inside.

The garden and I are both grateful for the rain. The hot and dry weather doesn’t suit either of us. I’m happier in the cooler seasons of the year, which might explain why my autumn garden is going better than the summer one! The purple sprouting broccoli is starting to grow past its cabbage white damage, to the point where I am starting to stake it now, against the wind rock that will damage its roots in the winter. The flower sprouts haven’t got to that stage yet, but at least they are planted out in their final home and can start getting their roots down into the fertile soil. The leek bed is doing well, although there are one or two holes where seedlings have died. It doesn’t matter.

Happy midwinter everyone! For the last few weeks I have been deliberately trying to slow down, to spend some time relaxing and recuperating after a busy year. The garden has been doing the same, and so I have been leaving it to its own devices. When I have thought about it, it’s been more in terms of what I might choose to grow next year.

Ryan and I have just spent a few days in Dorset, and – apart from Friday when it rained non-stop – the weather was lovely. While we were there we popped in* to see Joy Michaud at Sea Spring Seeds, a small company that sells plants and seeds, specialising in chillies. You may have met Joy on the Sea Spring Seeds stand at a gardening event – she loves taking her seeds on the road and meeting her customers, even though there’s plenty of work to be done back at the farm!

One of the great challenges, during our summer of waiting to move, has been feeding ourselves. We packed away a lot of the ‘unnecessary’ cooking equipment for a few weeks, only to find it was out of action for a few months. With numerous false starts, I kept running down the cupboards and the freezer, in anticipation of a move date that never came. Stress levels rose, cooking mojo vanished and we ate far more oven chips than you can imagine.

In a typical year, I do my garden planning before Christmas. But last year wasn’t normal, and normality (whatever that means) has yet to return. I thought I’d thought about it, but it turns out – not so much.

Thompson & Morgan is launching two intriguing new winter squash varieties that they say taste just like mashed/baked potato when they’re cooked. As an alternative to potato, they contain fewer calories and less carbohydrate, but more fibre. T&M think they’re on to a winner with these, given the trends towards healthy eating, plant-based diets and home-grown vegetables.

I was out in the potting shed yesterday morning and sowed the first seeds of my 2019 gardening season – sweet peppers, leeks, purple sprouting broccoli and some salads. They’ll all be inside for the next few weeks, as although the weather is unseasonably warm, it cannot be relied upon.

The latest Cargo Dragon resupply mission docked with the ISS on Saturday, and the crew have been unpacking essential supplies. Their fresh food treats this time are Gala apples, navel oranges, cherry tomatoes, onions, lemons, mini peppers and ripe avocados.

A new year is just around the corner and paint brands have already started announcing their colors of the year. Color, whether through paint or decor, is the simplest way to evoke a feeling in a room. These colors range from traditional to truly unexpected, setting the bar for just how creative we can be in our homes. Whether you're looking for tones that evoke tranquility and calm, or just want to spice things up with something unexpected, The Spruce has got you covered.

Behr

We have some beautiful Indoor Vines You Can Grow for Fragrance that can add a lot of appeal to the rooms with a pleasing aroma!

Hydroponic gardening is a method that uses a supply of water with other water-fertilizer solutions to grow plants. Hydroponic systems grow faster than other conventional ways, and more importantly, they are suitable for all seasons.