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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! 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] £1.65 Lipstick This great modern variety matures at least a couple of weeks before the others, forming lots of large pointy red peppers with thick flesh and a good 'sweet pepper' flavour. Also delicious eaten even earlier at the green stage. We grow it every year and it always does really well; if you grow only one pepper then this is the one to go for! Nice roasted, raw or cooked in sauces. The skin is nice and thin, and the flesh is nice and thick. Perfect really. Very early, meaty red conical pepper. Now sold out, sorry. The Kaibi Round below is just as good, though. 'Kaibi Round' NEW for 2008 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. Last year we released just a few packets to rave reviews, so we have bulked it up to offer in the main catalogue this year. 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. Order SPKR - 25 seed [OG1] £1.85 'Ometepe' Early Green Pepper This is a green pepper first sent to us by Will Woys-Weaver, collected in Nicaragua. Ometepe is the name of an island in the middle of Lake Nicaragua, and we think the pepper comes from there. The pepper is a semi-bell type, with a square blocky shape, plus a good point on the end. The flesh is nice and crisp and juicy, and it is very early to make green peppers. (But if you want early red peppers choose something else as they then ripen slowly to red.) The plants are medium tall to about 3 feet, and may need a stake if they set lots of peppers! After this year may not be offered for a while as we have so many others in the seedbank waiting to be grown out, so do consider saving your own seed. Order SPOM- 25 seed [OG1] £1.20 '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] £1.49 '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] £1.65 'Orange Bell' New for 2008 Another great new pepper for the new catalogue. 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 £1.55 'King of the North' sweet green bell NEW for 2008 We have been looking for new, cold-adapted, big green bell peppers for a while, and this one is our best yet. This one, new this year, was bred specifically for home gardeners with short summers. In our trials this year, 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 £1.60   ~ 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! This seed was grown for us by Clive Richards of Ascot, Berkshire, and Anne Bartlett in Portugal. Order SPDM - 20 seed [OG2] £1.69 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.