Ami, tell me how you did winter sowing with peppers. That's intriguing. I have not had good luck with bell peppers. Fortunately, the "real peppers" (hot) do quite well for me.

I even had an Ají pepper volunteer, coming up in June, and it produced alright.

George
Tahlequah, OK

George, that was the first year I got back to gardening. I am sure I bought my seeds in a store, but I dont remember where. I put the pepper seeds in a milk jug, cut in half and I think the lid removed. It probably was NOT winter, but spring, maybe March. We had a number of jugs, which were in a black tub meant for mixing cement. (may have warmed them more than other options? ) My dogs decided the jugs still smelled like milk and destroyed several. I remember I had about given up on getting seedlings when I noticed the peppers growing. I ended up with 4, planted in large pots. At frost I harvested a lot and brought in a plant with a dozen peppers on it. We ate on those till Christmas. Just as it was blooming again mealy bugs got it BAD. I had to throw away a 25 year old hoya that was hanging above it. Any way, my point is, I didn't know what I was doing, a lot went wrong, so it was probably just luck - or maybe it is CA Wonders. I had no seeds left this year and had not started saving seeds yet (kicking myself for that), so I used purchased transplants this year that suffered from aphids and produced very little.

I'm certainly no bell pepper aficionado. But California Wonder seems to me, in the world of bell peppers, to be like Rutgers, in the world of tomatoes. It's an old stand by and widely adapted.

George

I agree that CalWonder is widely adapted and, hence, widely grown. I've grown at least a dozen other varieties, though, that perform just as well if not better. In fact, I don't think I've ever had any sweet pepper variety fail to produce well. Once you understand how the weather affects them and can give them what they need, they perform just fine. However, I think those of you who live in northeastern OK that normally have a lot more humidity and rainfall than I have in a typical year might have more disease issues than I have here in southcentral OK.

Before I list varieties that have done well for me here, I want to mention 2 or 3 things that influence pepper plant production here.

First, it is typical to think of peppers and tomatoes as being similar in terms of them sharing a simillar planting time and growing conditions, but peppers are less cold-tolerant than tomatoes and suffer from the cold if you try to put them into the ground as early as you can put tomato plants in the ground. I always start their seeds at the same time, but aim to put the tomato plants in the ground (or in their permanent containers) when they are 6-8 weeks old but will hold the peppers a few weeks longer. While tomato plants will tolerate cold nights (above freezing) early in the season and produce well anyway, pepper plants that are exposed to soil and air conditions that are too cold for them early in the season can remain stunted and/or slow to produce for weeks or even months. For that reason, I try to keep the peppers in the greenhouse all nice and toasty warm until soil and air temperatures stay consistently above 55 degrees. This means that often the pepper plants go into the ground a month later than the tomato plants. In our early years here, I put tomato and pepper plants in the ground at the same exact time (it worked in Ft Worth 80 miles south of where I now live) and found that while the tomato peppers produced fine, the peppers were sluggish. Based on what I have learned since then, I believe this occurs because the night time temperatures here stay much cooler later in the season than they did in Fort Worth. After forcing myself to transplant the peppers later, later and later....I saw that I got better production from them than when I planted them early. Then I did research online and learned that pepper plants are less tolerant of early cold exposure.

Sweet peppers always have seemed more persnickety about production here. They might not be quite as big of a garden diva as carrots, but they come close. I try to choose varieties with DTMs (for the green stage) in the 60s so that I will have a multitude of green peppers ready for harvest in June when my main crop of tomatoes is ripe and ready for salsa-making. So, no matter which variety I plant, the entire early crop gets picked green for salsa. I can 100-150 jars of salsa a year, and sometimes more, because we give away a lot of it as Christmas gifts. Then, after the salsa making is completed, usually by late June or early July, I let all the future sweet bells ripen to their mature color of orange, yellow, red or whatever and then I pick those.

High heat and high humidity can cause blossom drop on bell peppers, so I feel like we really have to try to put them in the ground as early as we can without exposing them to excessive cold so that they have time to bloom and set peppers before the weather gets too hot.

Hot peppers set fruit at much higher temperatures, but sometimes in the worst summer heat they will suffer from blossom drop as well, though it has to be really hot---from what I have seen in my garden, hot pepper plants will set fruit even when high temperatures are a little over 100 degrees (though not when they are a lot over 100) whereas with sweet peppers, highs in the 90s can cause blossom drop.

So, given that all the following have produced equally well as long as the weather is halfway cooperative, these are the varieties that have done well in my garden: California Wonder, Yolo Wonder, Super Heavyweight, Blushing Beauty, Roumanian Rainbow (the prettiest hot pepper plant with fruit in shades of ivory turning to orange and red, often with all 3 colors on the plant at one time), Chocolate Beauty, Gold Summer, Jupiter, Lilac Beauty, Orange Gourmet, and my favorite---the three bell peppers in Renee's Garden Seeds "Jewel Tone Sweet Bells", a blend with three varieties (color coded with non-toxic food dye) in one packet: Admiral (a golden bell), Valencia (an orange bell) and North Star (a red bell).

You have to adjust your expectations to what we know about how bell peppers produce in our climate. You get a good harvest most years from the early flowers that set fruit in May (sometimes even in April in a warm spring after a warm winter) and produce green peppers of a usable size in June (or, if you leave them to turn to their mature color, in July). Then, after you harvest that early fruit, if the temperatures allow, more blossoms will give you more fruit that you can harvest in July or August. This is weather-dependent. If it gets really hot really early, by the time you harvest the early greenies, it may be too hot for the next flowers to set fruit. You may have to wait for a cool, rainy spell (which we do sometimes get in mid-summer) that will allow more flowers to set fruit. Then, from summer and autumn flowers, you'll get a massive autumn harvest and will have peppers running out of your ears.

If you want a non-stop harvest of sweet peppers for fresh eating as snacks and for use in salads and cooking, you might try some of the mini bells that produce peppers a couple of inches tall and wide. They produce huge yields all summer long (kinda remind me of the way bite-sized tomatoes produce all summer even after larger-fruited varieties are shut down by the heat). These often are sold as Baby Bell Peppers, although their mature adult size is small---it isn't that you harvest them as actual baby peppers. Or, you can plant "Yummy Mix" for lovely little elongated red, yellow and orange sweet peppers that are not the shape of bell peppers, but which are very flavorful. Or you can plant some of the non-bell sweets like Gypsy or Cubanelle.

No matter what variety I plant, I tend to get a good harvest but that was not always true. In my earlier years as a pepper gardener, I planted them too early and got erratic production from some varieties. I also wasn't using row cover then and didn't have a greenhouse, so once they left the house and were put into the ground, they had to deal with whatever weather they got. That led to erratic behavior some years caused by early cold exposure. Nowadays, with the use of heavy duty, frost blanket-type floating row cover and jugs (milk jugs, 2-liter coke bottles, cat litter jugs or buckets, etc.) of water to serve as solar collectors (similar to the way Wall-O-Water or Kozy Koat plant protectors work), I likely could put pepper plants into the ground at the same time I plant the early tomato plants in late March, but I just don't. As much as anything else, it it just a habit now to plant them a month or so later.

It also might help to know that peppers are one of the few crops that can produce so heavily that they may need to be pushed along hard with lots of fertilizer. When I was a younger gardener in Texas, the extension agents and garden writers/horticulturalists emphasized over and over that peppers were one of the few veggies that you could fertilize so heavily that you almost burned them, and they'd still produce and, in fact, would produce very heavily. I never really believed it, and was afraid to push them that hard with synthetic fertilizers, but tried it in our early years here (when our soil was not very well-amended yet) and it worked just fine. I don't have to do that now because our soil is so highly amended with organic matter that fertility is not an issue, but if my pepper plants slowed down production and I thought they needed a push from fertilizer, I wouldn't hesitate to feed them in order to push them along.

Finally, these are the OSU-recommended sweet pepper varieties for home gardeners in Oklahoma, and I haven't grown many of them: Corona (yellow), Earlired (red), Gator Belle, Gold Summer, Jupiter, Keystone Resistant Giant #3, Melody and Sweet Banana. I do not know how often OSU updates their lists of recommended varieties, and new varieties come out all the time that have been bred for higher yields, more uniform fruit or improved disease resistance. I keep an eye on the pepper varieties carried by Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, Willhite Seed Company and Tomato Growers Supply Company so I can keep up with the latest hybrid offerings.
Dawn