In Praise of Peppers

As the sage once said, “Nobody can be un-cheered with a balloon.” I feel more or less the same about peppers. In the supermarket they're not much to look at really, since they're so uniform they look (and taste) characterless and cloned, as if someone has been using Photoshop and got a bit carried away with the 'capsicum stamp' tool. Even more depressing are 'traffic light' (or 'stoplight') packs of three; one green, one yellow, one red, end to end in a condom of polythene with a barcode on the end. So far as flavour is concerned you have to venture into the pricy realms of the red pointed peppers, which are ostentatiously over-packaged to let you know how special they are (but mostly to make sure that the harrassed woman on the checkout knows she should be making you hand over your wallet at knifepoint).

Sweet peppers in October, ready for the freezer

Peppers grown organically at home are a different matter entirely. So variable in size, shape and colour that some of them are downright wonky, even picked green they have as much flavour as the poshest supermarket specimens. Once they begin to blush the sweet varieties are so tasty that I just cut them in half, take the seeds out, place them cut side up on a baking tray and drizzle them with olive oil before roasting them for twenty minutes – and serve them just as they are. You can do that with the green ones too, but they benefit from a tiny sprinkling of raw cane sugar just before they go in the oven.

Here in the UK though, ripening them can be a bit tricky. With the gulf stream keeping things mild during the winter it's easy to forget that we are on the same latitude as Moscow, and our summers are just that little bit too short and cool for peppers to do well outside. I could grow peppers in a greenhouse of course, but I could never afford one big enough to grow hot weather crops in anything like the amounts the family needs – which is why I have a polytunnel. In my case it worked out as four times the area for half the price.

To be eating fresh produce all year round winter and 'hungry gap' crops are every bit as important as hot weather crops in the polytunnel, so you have to be a bit ruthless coming into autumn to create the space you need to get started before the light levels drop. My pepper plants have diplomatic immunity to that, though, because I grow them in pots and can shuffle them around as space allows. They spend most of the summer on a high suspended shelf, but when it's time to cure the onions (done in the tunnel, unless the weather is unexpectedly fine) they have to move down to ground level where a few supports help to avoid stem damage from the weight of all that lovely fruit.

An early start is just as important for peppers as it is for tomatoes, so I generally sow them at the same time in modules in my little heated propagator, potting them on into newspaper pots on a sunny windowsill. For the best flavour they need to stay on the plants for as long as possible to ripen thoroughly, but as with peas and beans this means a lower overall yield. The solution to this is to have some plants for picking green, which will crop well over a long period, and leave the plants for red peppers untouched. A good mulching with chopped comfrey leaves helps the fruit to swell and ripen, although you could use liquid tomato feed or comfrey leaf tea (if you can stand the smell).

I managed to put our main harvest off until the start of October this year, since that's when ripening has more or less stopped here (you can cut the whole plant and hang it upside down indoors if you want to push things a little further) but I left a couple alone to see how long the fruit would stay in good condition on the plant, extending the fresh harvest being the real trick in keeping a varied diet. Yesterday (the end of November) I got fed up looking at them, and cut the rest. Although one or two of the fruits had shown signs of mould during November and had to be removed, most of them were just fine – and they were crisp and tasted almost as good as they did in summer. This changes pepper growing from being a tasty but short-lived indulgence into an important part of our diet for almost four months of the year – and not a traffic light in sight!