A peck of peppers

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.

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.

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.

Join Emma the Space Gardener as she explores cultivating the cosmos, planting planets and sowing seeds in space. The second episode of Gardeners of the Galaxy includes a look at the current state of plant experiments on the International Space Station, a rundown of the missions on their way to Mars and a sneak peek at the future of space chillies. And there’s a seed giveaway too!

2022 was such a rotten year in the garden that I’m still not sure I want to be a gardener any more. There was a heatwave, and a drought, and a hosepipe ban, and then rats (coming in from next door, very hard to discourage!). Since then neighbours who had rented out their house have moved back in – with their cat that sh*ts in my garden.

If you are looking for some striking and colorful addition to your vegetable garden, here are the best Types of Ornamental Pepper Varieties for you to grow!

Those are my faded little hot chiles (above), in case you think I’m kidding. I’ll replace them with a new shiny red set this fall, promise.STUFFED PEPPERS (with Uncle Ben’s, chop meat, onion, Parmesan) were a staple of growing-up years, baked in Mom’s deep Pyrex casserole dish with V-8 juice as the liquid. So 1960s—and so easy and filling, right? (These days I skip the meat and use brown rice, plus pine nuts, onions and raisins, with my own tomato sauce thinned-down as the juice.)But my go-to pepper dish is appetizer, not main: simple oven-roasted pep

HOW DOES YOUR (PEPPER) GARDEN GROW? Are there healthy green plants, but no fruit? Or maybe fruit with shrunken, dark ends? Need an overall refresher course on growing Capsicum? This page on peppers has answers and links about all that–plus tactics for freezing any excess harvest for offseason use, and how I roast sweet peppers for use now (or to tuck into the freezer, too, all sugary and wonderful, a treat to brighten winter days).Categoriesfreezing & canning recipes & cooking vegetables

First, the BirdNote backstory: In 2002, the then-executive director of Seattle Audubon heard a short public-radio show called StarDate. “We could do that with birds,” she thought. In 2005 the idea became a two-minute, seven-day-a-week public-radio “interstitial” (short program) that recently caught my ear. I asked BirdNote to help answer the recent questions you had asked me. (In case you missed installment Number 1, we tackled: How do birds make themselves at home—even in winter? Week 2 was about birds on the move: the miracle of hummingbird migration, and on flying in formation.)Parts of Ellen’s answers below are in 2-minute audio clips to stream (all in the green links–or you can read the transcripts at those links if you prefer). Here we go:mobbing the bigger guysQ. A lot of us have witnessed, and wondered about, much-smaller birds bravely chasing big raptors overhead, and also small songbirds who seem to mob owls. What’s up with these Davids chasing Goliaths in the

And that’s where the seed for ‘Liebesapfel’—the pepper that began Sarah Kleeger and Andrew Still’s fast-growing Capsicum annuum collection—arrived from, or more specifically, Germany via Denmark.On their first Seed Ambassadors trip to search out potentially Northern-adapted seed from Europe in 2006, Sarah and Andrew carried ‘Liebesapfel’ (left) back to the New World themselves—tho

“Yes—right here on the vent cap today,” came the affirmative reply to my “Any drumming there yet?” My friend Ellen Blackstone of the BirdNote public-radio program, enjoyed her first performance in Seattle February 11, 2015, only five days after mine. (Update: In 2016, my first performance came on February 7. In 2017, one pileated began, near the southwest edge of the garden, on Jan. 2. In 2018, one pileated in the woods to the east of the garden has been drumming nearly daily since New Year’s.) Gutters, siding, and even the occasional satellite dish: all fair game for sounding the tattoos, all good amplifiers.As with every conversation with Ellen—the tour guide for our ongoing series of bird stories (browse all past installments)—a simple question yielded multiple lessons: what’s all the noise is about; who drums (just males, or females, too?), and how to tell the genders of species in the woodpecker family, the Picidae, apart.

Regular listeners will remember my winter conversation with Joseph about shopping the seed catalogs–when with his Joseph-style enthusiasm he got us all madly poring over his list of unusual sources, and confessed to such addictions as dwarf tomatoes, and zinnias.What he didn’t admit to then were the pepper and gladiolus addictions, and he failed to tell us about his recently self-published book of kooky illustrations about guess what? The state of garden obses