Plant Care Library

Group/Class:  Hot Fresno

Description:

A beautiful compact bushy variety with an excellent heat tolerance; produces fruit with a sweet and mildly spicy, smoky flavor; performs wonderfully in patio containers or small gardens; can be harvested either green or red; great for grilling or salsa

Edible Qualities

Sweet Heat Hot Pepper is an annual vegetable plant that is commonly grown for its edible qualities, although it does have ornamental merits as well. It produces small green oblong peppers (which are technically 'berries') with red flesh which are typically harvested when mature. The fruit will often fade to red over time. The peppers have a smoky taste and a crunchy texture.

The peppers are most often used in the following ways:

• Fresh Eating
• Eating When Cooked/Prepared
• Cooking
• Baking
• Pickling

Planting & Growing

Sweet Heat Hot Pepper will grow to be about 10 inches tall at maturity, with a spread of 14 inches. When planted in rows, individual plants should be spaced approximately 12 inches apart. This vegetable plant is an annual, which means that it will grow for one season in your garden and then die after producing a crop.

This plant is quite ornamental as well as edible, and is as much at home in a landscape or flower garden as it is in a designated vegetable garden. It should only be grown in full sunlight. It does best in average to evenly moist conditions, but will not tolerate standing water. It is not particular as to soil pH, but grows best in rich soils. It is somewhat tolerant of urban pollution. Consider applying a thick mulch around the root zone over the growing season to conserve soil moisture. This is a selected variety of a species not originally from North America.

Sweet Heat Hot Pepper is a good choice for the vegetable garden, but it is also well-suited for use in outdoor pots and containers. It is often used as a 'filler' in the 'spiller-thriller-filler' container combination, providing a mass of flowers against which the larger thriller plants stand out. Note that when growing plants in outdoor containers and baskets, they may require more frequent waterings than they would in the yard or garden.