New and Old Friends - Do You Grow Hybrid Bell Peppers

[greenthumbomaha]

We don't talk nearly as much about peppers as we discuss tomatoes, so let's share opinions!

I've grown hybrid and OP peppers for many yeras, but rarely achieve the volume that other local gardeners realize when. they buy their transplants from big box stores. I presume these are hybrids. In my garden ybrids outpace OP (king of The North, Big Red, Cal Wonder, etc) .

In addition to bell peppers, I also grow a variety of Corno, Carmen, Cubenelle, Marconi, etc. However , I need to buy bell seeds this year. A few years ago I bought 5 varieties at Johnny's and there was no clear winners in the production department. I 'd like just one that us stellar. Ace F1 was below par for me.

Giant Marconi F1 (Hybrid though there is an OP Marconi which comes in a bit later) is an amazing pepper but I don't want to rely on one variety in a changing climate.Seeds are becoming hard to find too.

What are the best (and worst)peppers in your garden? Did you ever grow an awesome orange bell pepper ?

- Lisa

[habitat-gardener]

Gourmet F1 has been a pretty good orange bell in my garden for the past couple years.

I attempted to grow a variety of orange bells last year. I will have to look at my garden journal for details, but iirc, Etiudia was also pretty good.

Mega Marconi is the most impressive pepper this year. Huge and sweet, and OP.

(Lisa, I can send you some saved seeds. I haven’t bagged any of my peppers, though.)

[karstopography]

Gatherer’s Gold was a very nice, productive, flavorful medium sized orange non-bell pepper. I don’t think it is a hybrid.

Hybrid bell peppers in my experience do out-produce and out-perform non-hybrid bell peppers. Sweet Bella, Red Standard, other hybrid bell peppers stay healthier, more vigorous and more productive throughout our long growing season than non hybrid types. I think next season I will not even try any open pollinated bell peppers and just stick with hybrid bells.

Giant Aconcagua has been an outstanding performing and large sweet pepper. I believe that pepper isn’t a hybrid.

Jimmy Nardello, while initially good, has low staying power and declining vigor over our long season. Same for Frank’s sweet pepper.

[greenthumbomaha]

I should have mentioned one exception. California Wonder beats other OP's from what I have experienced and rivals hybrids, but not in my garden. In my zone 5b MG (Master Gardener) donation garden, it is planted in pure site made compost from spent greens, irrigated via drip tape on timers, and heavily mulched with straw. They are huge and prolific. I do not have these perfect conditions, and need a little magic built in to the seed!

- Lisa

[Seven Bends]

For a standard green (turning to red) bell pepper, we get great results from Alliance and Declaration (both hybrids). Healthy, vigorous plants with a heavy yield right up until frost. This year in hotter and drier than normal conditions, Alliance significantly outperformed Declaration, but most years they've been pretty similar. Our normal summer climate is hot and humid with frequent afternoon/evening showers and thunderstorms, and there's a lot of disease pressure, particularly bacterial leaf spot. Alliance and Declaration both have resistance to multiple strains of it.

I grew an orange snack pepper called Hamik (hybrid) this year for the first time and liked it. The plants were healthy and productive, and the peppers were very sweet.

[worth1]

I have up on Bell peppers because all I ever tried was open pollinated.

[Paulf]

I mostly grow hybrid peppers but they have to be short to mid season varieties because of the shorter growing season here. Bells seem not to come in short season varieties but I still grow some hoping there is a bit of a harvest; not very often ripe peppers but greenies are OK. I do better with long peppers and snacking size.

[karstopography]

I’m planning on upping my numbers of sweet peppers in 2024 and downsizing my hot pepper numbers. We barely eat hot peppers, mostly only fresh jalapeños and dried cayenne pepper when we do. I’m over making hot sauce as more trouble than it’s worth and not especially better than the commercial sauce.

We cook a lot with bell peppers so I plan on growing at least 6 plants and likely more. Late season bell peppers aren’t as pretty or big as earlier in the year, but they are still useful in recipes.

[Shule]

The trick for bell peppers in my garden is to use black plastic, prefertilize the soil, grow Canary Bell, and water deeply and more often than you water tomatoes. Canary Bell very prolific and gets big peppers. It has a Habanero-like taste without the heat (and milder in flavor than a Habanero). It's yellow, though (not orange, although I did grow an orange offtype one year, which tasted even better). Canary Bell makes excellent stuffed peppers.

If you can't handle the idea of using black plastic in the ground, then growing in the ground, covering it with shredded wood mulch can also be helpful,

Growing in containers can be helpful for peppers, but for bell peppers, you probably need a bigger container than for other peppers. You probably would do well to use more fertilizer, too, and a good quality pre-fertilized potting soil. Don't use a low quality soil amendment that just looks like potting soil. Believe them if they don't advertise it as potting soil. What soil you use is very important. I recommend looking for soil that is advertised as both indoor and outdoor soil (rather than just outdoor). I think they tend to make it better quality, since a lot of people don't fertilize their houseplants very much.

I've grown F1 hybrids. Of those, the only bell pepper that comes to mind is Big Bertha F1, and it did pretty well for the conditions I grew it in. I haven't tried any of the fancy new hybrids, though.

I mostly grow OP peppers, so I can get the benefits of seed-saving, and so I don't have to buy them every year. However, Canary Bell does well enough that I don't feel the particular need to look into hybrids (other than for curiosity's sake).

Anyway, before I tried those tricks, my seed-grown peppers didn't do too much (especially the bell peppers). They would be stunted, and get few to no fruits, undersized.

Oh, another trick is how you start them. If you can make sure they're hardened off from the get-go, they seem to appreciate that. I take my seedlings outside during the day, every day but Sunday and when it's too cold or something. I do this as soon as they sprout. The plants don't get as big before the transplant (they can be pretty tiny, in fact), but it doesn't seem to matter much like it does if you don't keep them hardened. They grow fast once transplanted. (That's considering the prefertilization of the ground soil, too.) If you don't keep them hardened off and don't prefertilize or use black plastic, then yeah, you want to get your pre-transplant plants a decent size (and start them earlier than tomatoes). I like to start mine around March 15th to 17th with the process I described, taking them outside.

Pot size probably matters, too. I use seed-starting trays with containers that are somewhat bigger than average.

I've grown a lot of kinds of peppers, but Canary Bell is my favorite sweet pepper, and it doesn't succomb to a certain disease that stunts the peppers, makes the plants miniature and gives them chlorosis. Verticillium doesn't seem to bother it terribly, either, but it does experience some foliar symptoms that don't seem to slow it down, and I haven't seen any of mine wilt from it, so far.

[JRinPA]

I have only tried a few OPs. Cal Wonder would never produce and would get rotted lobes. King of the North (the name got me of course) were small. Decent production I guess, but small. I just do much better with the romani peppers.

I have not tried hybrid bells but perhaps I should if they are that much better...

[Paulf]

Thank you Shule for the information...very helpful. Until this year all peppers were in-ground. This year several plants were grown in containers (55 gal drums cut lengthwise and elevated by homemade racks). All the varieties I grow are hybrid and the container grown peppers did much better than the traditional in-ground crop. My wife is in charge of the containers...now up to nine large areas including 5 55gal drums, two large cattle watering tanks , a sheep waterer, a couple of large store bought metal containers and a store bought redwood container. Next year I will see how much space I can weasel out of her.

[zeuspaul]

I grow only California Wonder OP in containers. It's a staple in the local nurseries. I start then from seed just like tomatoes but add some heat during the germination stage.

I grow them in twelve, twenty-five, and forty gallon containers. Two in a twelve, three in a twenty-five and three in a forty. I fertilize once at time of planting using Garden-Tone Herb and Vegetable. I use recycled 511 potting mix which has been amended over time with crushed egg shells, spent tea leaves and the like because they are free and available. Also additions of Kellog's Patio Plus as needed.

[slugworth]

I just did a grip and rip on plants in the garden yesterday.
I was surprised the root ball was only the size of your fist.
Some plants are over 1 year old from last year and I have them in the house now.
They look weary so I don't know if they will continue to live or not.
A mix of bell peppers and mystery fryer plants that were unlabeled when I got them in the spring.
Peppers will grow for years indoor outdoor indoor if you can keep them bug free.
The stems start getting woody like a tree.
we had a drought for weeks so I was stunned and amazed they were still alive.
The plants had to be staked to keep them from keeling over.
They produced til jack frost nipped them.

[Labradors]

I too have been disappointed in the yield of many OP peppers - with one exception: Gatherer's Gold. However, it's on the late side for me, so most end up in the freezer.

Zupska is early and productive, so I will always grow it.

This year, I discovered Ancient Sweets, which has amazing flavour, and production didn't seem too bad, so another winner!

[slugworth]

I believe a lot of the woes are soil related.
One year I dug up plants my cousin had that produced huge bell peppers.
The next year in my garden the peppers were puny.
PH needful things or some mineral that was lacking.
Soil ideal for tomatoes may not be ideal for peppers.

[zeuspaul]

I rarely get a hard freeze so my peppers survive the winter. However the over wintered plants don't do nearly as well as the new starts. If I cut them back they do better but still not the best. Next I'll try an extreme cut back to see how ell they do.

[rxkeith]

i have grown socrates in the past with some success.
bell peppers, open pollinated or hybrids are hit and miss for me.
some years good, some years not so good. we don't have the long
stretch of warm weather that peppers need. i have had some luck
with yolo wonder, and staddons select in the past for open pollinated
peppers, but not consistently. usually if i get size in a bell pepper, i still
have to pick them green before frost gets them, so rarely can i save seed
from them.


keith

[rossomendblot]

The Cornitos hybrids bred by Johnny's are the most productive peppers I've ever grown. Unfortunately the seed is quite hard to find in the UK and the only shop selling it has been out stock for a long time. Otherwise, I would grow it every year! I've also had good success with Thor, Astor and Black Knight, which are hybrid full size corno di toro types.

The most productive OPs I have grown are Amy, Oda and Nocturne, but they aren't bells.

I don't grow many bells anymore because they take so long to ripen here. Etiuda was a pretty good orange bell the one year I grew it.

[JRinPA]

Thank you Shule for the information...very helpful. Until this year all peppers were in-ground. This year several plants were grown in containers (55 gal drums cut lengthwise and elevated by homemade racks). All the varieties I grow are hybrid and the container grown peppers did much better than the traditional in-ground crop. My wife is in charge of the containers...now up to nine large areas including 5 55gal drums, two large cattle watering tanks , a sheep waterer, a couple of large store bought metal containers and a store bought redwood container. Next year I will see how much space I can weasel out of her.

love to see some of those homemade racks for split 55s. Also what do you put in them. And how do you water them?

My peppers do well in ground or box bed but always looking for a better way.

[GoDawgs]

For ages I tried to grow only hybrid bells here with little success so I gave up. Then I read somewhere that sweet bells don't do particularly well in the Southeast due to heat, etc and to try the longer frying type peppers. Boy, that sure worked! Since then that's what I've grown (also jalapeno and cayenne that have never been a problem) until this summer.

In the MMMM swap I got some Orange Sun bell pepper seed (OP) and decided to start one. It grew pretty big and it did produce about five peppers; a first set of three and about a month later two more. That's it. But they were really big and sweet too! Orange Sun on right, Beaver Dam left:

24.07.12 Beaver Dam (l), Orange Sun (r).JPG

Unfortunately I forgot to save seed but still have a few to try another this spring. Hope it makes more or it will be dropped.