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~ REALLY EARLY SWEET PEPPER Seeds ~ To grow peppers in the UK, under cover or outdoors, you need really early varieties. After searching for extra-early sweet peppers for many years, we are pleased to offer a range that are unusually early, productive, and tasty. The very earliest ones tend to have slightly smaller fruit, while the others come a little later but crop more heavily. How to choose? Well, you can't really go wrong. All are 'early' and good - the main differences are that some make a few peppers very early, while the others make lots but later. We always grow a mix, so we get a few right at the start of the season and then the heavier bearing ones for our maincrop. All our peppers do really well in an unheated polytunnel , even in Wales! Please order your seeds in time. You really need to plant them by the middle of March at the very latest to have any chance of a decent crop. TIP: An electric propagator is ideal for starting pepper seed,but if you don't have one, you can still get excellent results by improvising with a warm airing cupboard, a radiator shelf or anywhere that is around 28-38C for at least a few hours in each day. Once germinated, the seedlings will grow on at lower temperatures. We grew some excellent plants this spring when our propagator was full by starting seed on the counter next to our Rayburn & then growing on in a sunny windowsill. Sweet Chocolate A chocolate-brown sweet semi-bell pepper! The only early chocolate pepper there is, this was bred by the late Prof. Elwyn Meader , specifically for home gardeners in cooler climates. The incredible colour comes from a purple skin overlaying a sweet brick-red flesh. It looks amazing sliced in salads, but also cooks well, coming out very sweet. Famous for its earliness and sweetness even in cool climates (I think the chocolate-coloured skin helps it absorb whatever sunlight there is available) this performs really well for us. The only early brown bell pepper Order SPSC - 20 seed [OG1] £1.74 'Kaibi Round' This is our latest new release, and we think it is the best-flavoured, meatiest pepper that we've got. It is from the Antonov family farm in central Bulgaria where it has been grown for generations. The original seed was given to us by Mitko Antonov - from his seed we selected several lines, and from those we have bred this new variety. It's great - the plants are very quickly covered in medium-sized juicy red bells, with very thick crisp flesh, and a particularly satisfying flavour. They are also excellent used green earlier in the season. Order SPKR - 20 seed [OG1] £1.95 'Napia' Early Pointy Red Pepper This is another incredibly early red pepper, with pointy red fruit and spirally curled-up tips like a turkish slipper. It has really good thick, crunchy sweet flesh, & we like it best raw rather than cooked. It was brought to us by a Bulgarian student. Last year it did very well in our trials, coming ready in the very first group of peppers, and we're pleased to have quite a few packets available for you to try. Order SPNA - 25 seed [OG1] £1.55 'Sunnybrook' To start our collection of ultra-early peppers, Ben spent ages trawling through the descriptions of the seedbanks of the USDA pepper collection. He was looking for old varieties of peppers that seemed to be repeatedly described as early and productive. From this, we made a shortlist and so started off our pepper trials. One thing to come out of this was 'Sunnybrook'. It is a very early bell pepper - trading size for speed but still very productive and tasty. Its about 1/2 the size of the big bells you get in the supermarkets, but with many times more flavour, and much, much earlier. Released in 1965, Sunnybrook is consistently among the earliest of our peppers, and the plants are covered in green bell peppers by mid-summer, which rapidly turn red. We always grow lots for our own use! Order SPSU - 25 seed [OG1] £1.69 'Orange Bell' Another great new pepper. As you can see, we've been working hard on our pepper trials recently. We've been looking for a good orange pepper for several years. Most orange peppers are either too late for the UK, or not tasty enough. But at last, success! This rare variety does really well in this country. It's a truly vigorous orange pepper , really early & so good for cooler areas. It was bred by Alex Heklar in 1989, and we think it is the best orange bell pepper for the UK climate. Apart from earliness and heavy setting, the best thing about this is the particularly sweet flesh.The plants grow very quickly, and make lots of large orange peppers which are nice and sweet both cooked and raw. They fry up nicely to a rich sweet sauce for pasta. The peppers really are huge and the plants make several in each clump. Order SPOB - 20 seed £1.64 'King of the North' sweet green bell We have been looking for cold-adapted, big green bell peppers for a while, and this one is our best yet. This one was bred specifically for home gardeners with short summers. In our trials the plants grew very fast and soon set a good crop of really large green bells. We were really impressed and will be growing more just for eating next year. If you leave them , they will of course then turn red, but they are particularly nice eaten as a big green pepper.. Order SPKN - 20 seed £1.64   The Untranslatable Pepper NEW This is a great, productive pointy lime-green pepper which is very popular all over Bulgaria. Traditionally a roasting pepper - char-grill it under the grill or over a gas burner - but the flesh is very crisp and nice in salads as well. It ripens to a bright orangey-red, too. And the name? Well, we were given the original seed at a party by some students from Buglaria, but despite their best efforts, plus two dictionaries and several bottles of red wine, we never did figure out what its name meant in English. (Things weren't helped by the fact that the only two dictionaries anyone had were Bulgarian-Greek and Russian-Spanish.) So it remains The Untranslatable Pepper. Tastes good though! Order SPUT - 18 to 20 seed £1.65       ~ A MORE UNUSUAL SWEET PEPPER ~ 'Dedo de Mocha' Sweet Ají A hot pepper without the heat! Given to us by pepper expert Jeff Nekola. Ají are a different species: Capsicum baccatum. This is one of the largest-fruited of our Ají peppers, the beautiful fruit are shiny, almost waxy in appearance and glow a deep red when ripe. Incredibly productive, & a favourite every year, we like it grilled and served with olive oil. Without the heat, subtle undertones of Ají flavour come out, with distinct smokey tastes being the most obvious. One of the easiest of our unusual / rare peppers to grow, though you do need a polytunnel or greenhouse. If you want a challenge - it can be overwintered if you keep it frost-free - we have one plant that is now 3 years old and last year it made over 270 peppers! We have had a couple of reports last year of stressed plants making some heat near the seeds. But in normal conditions this should be classed as a sweet pepper. Very rare, pretty easy to grow. Gently smokey Aji. Not hot - mostly: the occasional pepper is warm, especially towards the end of the season, or with plants in their second or third year. This seed was grown for us by Clive Richards of Ascot, Berkshire, and Anne Bartlett in Portugal. Order SPDM - 20 seed [OG2] £1.79 PS: The name of this traditional variety translates roughly as 'Amputated Fingers' , which is fair enough given the shape and colour, but seems to be in dubious taste! Luckily the peppers themselves taste good though.   Saving Sweet Pepper Seed: Peppers (both hot and sweet) do cross very easily, so if you want to save seed you need to either grow only one variety, or keep the insects out with a simple net cage. In particular (this is a common error!) sweet / hot is a single gene, and any crosses between the two will be hot the first year, then all mixed up thereafter . . . However, if the plants were isolated, the seed-saving bit is really pretty easy. Let the pepper get to its final ripe colour (which may not be what you expect!), cut it open, and flick out the seeds. That's it! Seed-saving instructions are included with your seeds, so you can do this yourself. And of course, seed-saving is only possible because these are all real, non-hybrid varieties.