Sweet bell peppers are a tender, warm-season crop and a relative of the tomato. Here’s how to plant and grow bell peppers in your garden!
Peppers resist most garden pests and offer something for everyone: spicy, sweet, or hot; and a variety of colors, shapes, and sizes. On this page, we focus on growing sweet bell peppers.
Unlike their spicy brethren, bell peppers do not contain capsaicin, which is the compound that gives hot peppers such as jalapeño peppers their pungency and heat.
Common Bell Pepper Questions
Do different-colored peppers come from different plants?
Surprisingly enough, the green and red bell peppers that we commonly see in supermarkets are actually the same pepper; the red bell peppers have just been allowed to mature on the plant longer, which changes their color and lets them develop a higher Vitamin C content. More mature peppers also tend to be sweeter than their greener counterparts.
However, there are quite a few varieties of bell peppers out there, including purple, yellow, orange, white, and brown ones.
Are there male and female peppers?
There is a popular myth which states that pepper fruits can be either male or female—the difference between them being that male peppers have 3 bumps on the bottom and are better for cooking, while female peppers have 4 bumps, have more seeds, are sweeter, and are better for eating raw. This is not true! Pepper fruits do not have a gender and any obvious difference between fruits is simply the result of growing conditions or variety.
