I only grew one sweet pepper variety this year because I figured that sweet peppers are easy enough to buy at the store and/or farmer’s market and I assumed there wouldn’t be any real difference in taste. Wrong. As a gardener I should really know better.

So the sweet peppers that I grew, Sweet Cherry Red, were delicious. I let them ripen as long as I could on the plants and picked them when they were a deep bright red. The taste is similar to a miniature sweet pepper that you would buy at the farmer’s market but a little sweeter and more intensely flavored.

The plant itself was nothing too exciting. It is a somewhat compact plant, growing around a foot tall, with green foliage. The peppers themselves are bite sized, although I would caution against just popping in your mouth – they contain a lot of seeds.

My only other complaint besides the seeds is that the plants only produce a small handful of peppers. I grew 3 of these plants and got about a dozen peppers altogether. So depending on how you look at it, it probably wasn’t really worth it to grow for only 4 miniature peppers per plant. But I would argue that the taste was worth it. If I were to grow this variety again, I would probably just opt for one plant and use the additional space for growing other varieties. I have my eye on a number of other sweet peppers to try next year, because obviously they do not taste the same as the ones you buy in the store. Sometimes when I sit back and think about my reasoning for things, I realize how much of a crazy person I actually sound like.

Next week I will discuss the NuMex Joe E. Parker hot pepper.

Sweet Cherry Red Peppers, Botanical Interests. No longer available on their own but the link is a mix that includes Sweet Cherry Red.