Easy Gardening: Tips For Growing 4 Popular Peppers

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Easy Gardening: Tips For Growing 4 Popular Peppers

Tomatoes often take the cake as being the easiest vegetables to grow, but some gardeners have found certain types of pepper plants are even easier. Green, yellow, red and even purple peppers can add tons of color, variety and spice to your garden and kitchen, and you can grow a huge assortment of pepper plants with just a little planning and time.

Unlike tomatoes, pepper plants aren’t vining, sprawling masses that can get wildly out of control. Pepper plants usually grow neatly with only a few limbs, and can easily be trained to grow straight up. Pepper plants thrive in hot, sunny conditions and most varieties do well with a constantly moist soil, but avoid standing water.

Another great thing about peppers is that insects typically avoid them, and most easy and common pepper varieties are resistant to disease. However, inspect your plants every few days to ensure something isn’t creeping in on your precious crops!

Getting Started With Peppers
Like tomatoes and many other vegetables, peppers grow best when started indoors a month or so before you plan on planting outside. This will give you the chance to control all the variables to give you the best pepper plants possible. Also, you’ll be able to grow peppers that you wouldn’t normally find at a garden center or nursery.

We won’t go into a full description of how to start seeds indoors, as you can find that information in other places on our site. Once you have seedlings and sprouts begin popping up, remove the weakest-looking ones to prevent competition.

About two weeks before planting time, begin hardening off your sprouts by putting them outside for an hour a day, during warm, sunny days. After five days of this, begin increasing their time outdoors gradually until planting time.

Of course, if you’re not interested in turning your home into a temporary greenhouse, you can purchase pepper plants already started for you at a garden center.

As you can imagine, pepper plants love full sun, so make sure you plant in an area of your garden that won’t get shady. Plant your peppers about 12 – 16 inches apart. Once planted, place a cage around the plants or stake them for protection and to encourage manageable limbs and foliage.

Pruning
In the first few weeks of planting, pinch off a few stems every few weeks to encourage your pepper plant to become bushier. Shoots will appear where you removed the stems. Do this every few weeks in the early growing season.

After a few weeks, your pepper plant should have white flower blooms. As hard as this may be, pinch off the early blooms to encourage more numerous and larger peppers to form later in the growing season. Doing this allows the pepper plant to concentrate on establishing a better root system. After you’ve removed these early blooms, you can stop.

If you have a few pepper plants, experiment with this technique and only pinch off the early blooms on half the plants and not the others. Then, compare to see which ones produce the best peppers.
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Bell peppers
Bell peppers are probably the most versatile and usable of all peppers, as their taste is quite mild and sweet. They are also extremely easy to grow and maintain, and don’t require any special care rules that most other plants don’t follow.

Many pepper gardeners have found that their pepper plants thrive with moist soil, so try to water about 1½ to 2 inches a week. To measure how much you’re watering, place a small container (some recommend an empty tuna can) near the area you’re watering. Measure the amount in the container to gauge how much you’ve watered…..More Here

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