Edible Pepper Garden. Rosalind Creasy

      My 1990 pepper garden took over the entire front yard and was interplanted with flowers for drying and for beauty. Both were harvested at about the same time and the bouquets were hung from the garage rafters to dry. The peppers were enjoyed fresh of course, but the bulk was either given to a food bank, frozen, or dried in the dehydrator.

      I have an unusual vegetable garden—it’s smack dab in my suburban front yard. Twenty-five years ago, I was forced to garden “around front.” Our backyard was hopelessly filled with large trees—a redwood, pines, and a fruitless mulberry—and between the shade and the root competition, a vegetable plant didn’t have a chance. In those days “veggiescaping” was considered verboten, and when I first planted vegetables around front, I felt forced to plant them surreptitiously in a narrow strip along the front lawn—hiding them among tall flowers. Fortunately, I was studying landscape design at the time, and it wasn’t long before it occurred to me that my frilly lettuces, ruby chards, most herbs, eggplants, and my pepper plants were every bit as beautiful as many so-called ornamentals and I could grow them in full view. Of course, planting them in long boring rows and covering the plants with old bleach-bottle cloches wouldn’t cut it in the front yard, but well-grown vegetables planted in decorative patterns, or interspersed with flowers, I knew would be lovely.

      It was in this same time frame that I was developing my concept of edible landscaping, which was later to become a book; thus my front flower border became part of my many design experiments. For a few years, I experimented with background borders of artichokes, chard, tall chili pepper varieties, and beans; middle borders of sweet peppers, eggplants, carrots, and bush peas; and front borders of parsley, strawberries, lettuces, and small ornamental peppers. As the years progressed, I found I needed more and more space for vegetables; the long narrow beds weren’t big enough and they limited my designs. So, every year the beds got larger and were reconfigured and the lawn got smaller. Finally, about fifteen years ago, the genie was completely out of the bottle, the remaining lawn came out, and I appropriated the entire front yard to grow vegetables and herbs to research varieties for my book Cooking from the Garden. That year, I trialed 110 varieties of vegetables in the front yard, and both my husband and the neighbors thought the garden quite wondrous. Once convinced I could make a vegetable garden a social success, I have since grown over thirty different theme vegetable and herb gardens in our front yard. (Since I garden in USDA Zone 9, that includes both winter and summer plantings.) One season, I planted a Native American garden, yet another year I chose a salad theme, and so on.

      The 1990 Pepper Garden

      In the summer of 1990, I decided that while over the years I had planted many pepper varieties, it was time to explore peppers in depth, and I planned a pepper garden in the beds near the driveway where they would get lots of heat. To intersperse color among the pepper plants, I selected many different types of flowers that dry well for bouquets.

      In January, I ordered seeds of twenty varieties of peppers, six special dry flowers, and some choice cutting flower varieties, all by mail. Pepper plants take a long time to get sizable enough to plant outside, so I started them in mid-February, about ten weeks before I planned to plant them outside—namely, in early May. This is at least a month earlier than I start my tomatoes and most of my other vegetables and flowers. I started most of the pepper seeds in potting soil in flats, others in quart containers. I planned for a plant each of most of the bells and hot chilies and a half dozen ‘Anaheims’ and two pimientos so I would have enough peppers to roast. To get the seeds to germinate quickly, I placed them in the oven of my gas stove, which has a pilot light that maintains a temperature of about 80°F when I leave the door ajar. In reading the germination information on the seed packages of both ‘Tepin’ and ‘Chili D’Arbol,’ I noted that instead of sprouting in the usual seven to ten days, they can take from fourteen to twenty-one days; therefore I planted them in their own container.

      As soon as the pepper seedlings emerged, the containers were moved onto my kitchen table and under florescent lights. (Two varieties failed to germinate. I assume, because eighteen varieties germinated easily, that the seeds of the ones that didn’t were either too old or hadn’t been handled properly by the grower or seed company.) After the seedlings produced their first set of true leaves (the leaves that appear after the first seed leaves), I moved each plant into its own four-inch-square container and fertilized them with quarter-strength fish emulsion. (You’re right, the kitchen smelled awful for a day.) A month or so later, I moved them up into one-gallon containers and repeated the fertilizer. By mid-April, the plants were ready to go outside, and I lined the containers up along an east-facing garage wall to get them acclimatized to the sun and nighttime temperatures. I also found a few pepper plants at the nursery that I wanted to try, and added them to my collection, which now numbered twenty-one.

      In early May, my crew and I planted out the peppers. After six years as a vegetable garden—one that had been mulched and babied every year—the soil they were to be grown in was already in great shape, filled with organic matter, and the beds and paths were in place. The peppers were to be planted in three long rows separated by existing brick paths. Flowers—namely, different colors of statice and gomphrenas and tall varieties of zinnias, cosmos, and lavatera—were spotted around. Drip-irrigation lines were already in place along the beds, and the individual strips of laser line were snaked around and among the transplants and held in place with ground staples.

      We had a cool but sunny May and early June, and the peppers were off to a slow start. Once the soil finally warmed up in mid-June, we applied a few inches of compost for a mulch, and in the heat most of the peppers finally took off. The peppers that lagged behind were some of the sweet bells. By mid-August, I had plenty of green jalapeños, serranos, and ‘Anaheims’ and a few ‘North Star’ and ‘Yolo Wonder’ green bells to harvest, but it wasn’t until mid-September that the bulk of the peppers started to really produce. And produce they did.

      I wouldn’t say I had a great harvest, but I had all the peppers I could possibly use and then some. Twenty-seven plants produced baskets and baskets of peppers, and the harvest lasted through October. Most of the bells were used in salads, peperonata, on the grill, and in numerous soups and stews. A lot were also shared with friends, family, and the local food bank. The very hot peppers—‘Tepin,’ ‘D’Arbol,’ and ‘Thai Hot’—produce lots of peppers, and a little goes a long way. Most of these, and all the different paprika peppers, I dried in my dehydrator to be enjoyed as seasoning throughout the year. To keep them safe from the pantry meal moths that I had in abundance (I found out later that there are pheromone traps that control these kitchen pests), I put the whole dried peppers in plastic freezer bags, labeled them, and put them in the freezer. I had planted six ‘Anaheim’ and two pimientos, and they produced four big grocery-store bags full of peppers over a six-week period. My daughter-in-law Julie and I spent hours every weekend roasting, peeling, and cutting them into strips so that they could be frozen in freezer bags. Although we said at the time that we would probably never use them all, both of us ran out of them by June. (We both got spoiled because all winter long we were able to make a great meal quickly; from roasted pepper soup for Christmas to a lunch of bean burritos; all we needed to do was reach in the freezer.)