VEGETABLE SEEDS Aubergines Beans - French Beans - Runner Beetroot Broad Beans Broccoli & Rapini Brussels Sprouts Cabbage Cauliflower Carrots Celery Chilli Peppers Courgettes & Summer Squash Cucumbers, Gherkins & suchlike things Fennel Flowers Grains Herbs Kale Kohl Rabi Leaf Greens for Cooking Leeks Lettuces Melons & Watermelons Mustard Greens ( for cooking) Onions - spring sowing Onions - overwintering Onions - special types Oriental Greens for cooking & salads Parsnips Peas Pumpkins & Winter Squash Radishes (salad, & cooking types) Root Parsley NEW Salad Vegetables Sweet Corn Swedes Sweet Peppers Tomatoes : Bush Types Tomatoes : Vines - Cherries Tomatoes : Vines - Larger Tomatoes : Bulgarian Tomatoes : New Centiflor types Tomatilloes & Groundcherries Turnips Unusual Tubers: Oca & Yacon

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 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.

Beautiful and delicious

Order SPSC - 20 seed [CO1] £2.23

SORRY now SOLD OUT for 2012. We are growing lots more this summer though for next year.

'Lipstick'

Here is an great old favourite which we are pleased to offer again after a long absence from the catalogue. We last had seed of this in 2004, and it was immensely popular at the time.

Lipstick is an ultra-early sweet pepper bred specifically for northern market gardeners and it does very well in the UK.

The small plants quickly set lots of  4" pointy  green fruit  which ripen to a truly lipstick-red colour.

Pointy, good thick flesh, early

Order SPLi - 18-20 seed [CO1] £2.25

'Kaibi Round'

This was our new release in 2009, 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 - 18 seed [OG1] £2.65

'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 - 18 seed [OG1] £1.94

---

'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 £2.12

---

'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 £2.25

---

'Amy' Sweet Hungarian Wax Pepper (Pale Yellow)

This is a sweet type of what is known as a Hungarian Wax pepper. It is an early variety, making lots of pale yellow sweet peppers. This type of pepper is traditionally grown in central Europe. 

You do get seeds for this type of pepper offered sometimes in the UK, but only of a chillied-hot version, called Hot Hungarian Wax. This sweet version is great but very hard to find, and we are really happy to be able to offer it for the first time this year.

We first grew it in Cambridge 20 years ago when we got our first allotments (his and hers allotments next to each other!), but it has taken us until now to find a source of the seed again so we can offer it in the catalogue.

The beautiful fruit have a wide, pointed cone shape and are extremely tasty. Very productive  and good fresh in salads or used in cooked dishes.

Order SPAy - 20 seed £1.79

---

Purple Beauty
Purple Beauty is one of the very few early-ripening purple peppers there is.
It makes sweet blocky bells that really are such a deep purple they appear almost black.

When you slice them open there's an amazing contrast with the bright flesh inside.  Delicious both raw and cooked, ideal for pepper sticks served with dips.

Great both cooked or raw , truly purple, and early.

Order SPPB - 20 seed £1.64

---

~ 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 easier 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 did have one plant that made it to 3 years old and in its 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 - 18 seed [OG2] £2.04

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.