Growing Peppers
The following words on growing peppers are offered with my tongue in my
cheek, which is a good place for it after
being splashed with the juice of a Jalapeno!
Growing peppers adds life and a touch of Latin spice to gardening whether
your favorite spot is in-house,
greenhouse, patio pot, or garden plot! From the mild green bell pepper to
the fiery hot habanera, peppers come in a
vast array of colors, shapes, sizes and tastes that add colorful zest to
your garden and flavorful zest to your
palate!
People have been growing peppers for centuries. Long before the Spanish
conquistadors discovered the tomato and
while most folks believed the world was flat, Columbus brought back the
first peppers to Spain. Through distribution
by migrating birds that indiscriminately dropped pepper seeds, peppers were
soon growing in ever corner of the Earth
and continued to grow even after the corners were rounded. However, even
before that, South American tribes were
growing peppers. In fact, some relics indicate that peppers have been grown
and eaten for over 2000 years. Since
that time, peppers have become a staple in many recipes.
Growing peppers is an easy part of gardening. Young seedlings quickly become
compact, shrub-like bushes. Petite
blossoms are soon replaced by tiny green fruits that at maturity are
transformed into a rainbow of colors from Kelly
green to gold to vibrant red to orange to purple. Of course, you won’t
typically find a rainbow of colors on a
single plant, although there are some hybrids that do display several
variations in color.
The variety you get from growing peppers certainly doesn’t stop with their
many colored coats. Peppers come in a
kaleidoscope of sizes, from cherry and chili to banana and bell and their
names are just as colorful and varied as
the peppers themselves: Habanera, Sweet Red, Green Bell, Banana, Cayenne,
Chili, Jalapeno, and Hungarian are just a
sample.
Hot peppers will tease your taste buds and sometimes take the joke too far,
but they will not make you sneeze!
Growing hot peppers is entirely different from growing the black or white
pepper spice that is commonly used in
cooking. Black and white pepper both come from a type of berry that grows in
India and Asia. The only similarity
between them and hot peppers is that both are dried before they are ground.
Although it is unknown if he was growing peppers, the folk hero, Peter Piper
immortalized the pepper when he picked
a peck of pickled peppers. However, it remains a mystery to this day what
happened to the peck of pickled peppers
Peter Piper picked.
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