How to grow hot peppers

Hot pepper covers the Capsicum annuum types grown for pungent, thin-walled fruit rather than the mild bell shape, valued for the range of heat and flavor a gardener can pack into a small footprint. Plants grow as compact, upright shrubs, typically 1 to 4 feet tall, holding fruit above the foliage as it ripens from green through red, orange, or yellow depending on how long it stays on the plant. Because the fruit is small and the plants stay tidy, hot peppers work well in containers and dense beds alike, and one healthy plant can carry a household through a season of cooking.

The hardest part of growing hot peppers well is holding fruit set through the hottest weeks of summer. North Carolina Cooperative Extension explains that daytime temperatures above 90 degrees, or nights above 75 degrees, make pollen too tacky to pollinate the flowers, so blossoms form and drop without becoming fruit. A second-year gardener who watched a spring flush of flowers and assumed a steady pipeline of peppers would follow often finds the plant stalls for weeks in peak summer, flowering heavily but setting nothing. Production resumes once nights cool, but the gap can eat a large share of a short season.