By Stephen Brueggerhoff, CEA – Horticulture, Brazos County AgriLife Extension; published 08/13/2025

You can pickle a peck, eat them raw, braise them, fry them, can, jelly or chop them into tiny bits to bring a little zest or sweetness to a home cooked meal. Peppers are an enticing and diverse fruit that is a global household staple and commonly associated with New World cuisine. I will explore with you the native origin of peppers, share some growing tips and delve into hotter than heck varieties.

Pepper Origins

Peppers are in the Nightshade Plant Family (Solanaceae), same as tomato and potato. Like their cousins, peppers are New World fruits with origins in Central and South America and domesticated thousands of years ago. Columbus voyages brought peppers back to Europe, introducing a piquant alternative to familiar black pepper and setting in motion distribution of a plant that would make a significant global impact for decades to come that includes Indian, Thai, Korean, Chinese, African and Latin American cuisine.

Know and Grow Peppers

Growing peppers can be a rewarding gardening experience. Like most vegetables, peppers require sandy loam soil with good drainage and a pH measuring 6 to 7.5. Fortunately for Brazos County gardeners, peppers can tolerate our growing environment. They are classified as a warm season crop, producing fruit in daytime temperatures up to mid 90-degrees and relatively cool nights up to the mid-70s.

Excessive high temperatures will reduce fruit size and may cause bloom drop; you may begin to see a reduction in fruit production at this time of year due to increased and longer duration summers temps. References for growing instruct to provide full sun for peppers, at minimum 8 hours of sunlight per day. However, higher irradiance increases the chance of sunscald on your fruit. The overall canopy of your pepper may be dense enough to provide some shade for developing fruit and reduce incidence of sunscald at this time of year. You may have to resort to make-shift tents made with shade cloth to reduce sunscald if your pepper plants are not doing the job. While we focus on planting peppers when the soil warms in spring (March to April) and then begin to harvest starting in June, you can plant pepper transplants in late July to mid-August for an outstanding October harvest. With a little bit of TLC, you can nurture your spring planted peppers through the summer for a fall harvest.

Pepper Diversity Brings on the Spice

Most of the domesticated peppers we use are botanically known as Capsicum annuum. This is a very diverse species that come in all shapes and sizes: mild and sweet bell peppers, hot and spicy jalapeños and varieties with distinctive flavors like New Mexico hybrids and cayenne pepper. C. annuum is one of four major species of pepper in cultivation that include Capsicum chinense, which produces some of the hottest peppers like Scotch Bonnet, Trinidad Scorpion, Bhut Jolokia and Carolina Reaper. A measurement called the Scoville Scale is used to determine the concentration of capsaicin, the compound giving hot peppers their spicy kick and reported as Scoville Heat Units, or SHU, in each variety of peppers. The testing method and scale, developed by American pharmacist Wilbur Scoville in 1912, involved taking an exact weight of dried pepper dissolved in alcohol to extract the compounds, then diluted in a measured solution of sugar water. The lucky taste testers would then sample each concoction, increasing the amount of sugar in solution until a majority of the panelists could no longer detect heat in dilution. Needless to say, results would vary widely between labs due to the subjectivity of the experiment. Current testing methods are more precise, using liquid chromatography to determine pungency. The winner for the hottest pepper is Pepper X, coming in at 2.69 million SHUs and beating out Carolina Reaper measured at 2.2 million SHUs. In comparison, jalapeños are lowest heat and average at 4 thousand SHU.

Let Your Tolerance Be Your Guide

While I do like the heat of varietal Mucho Nacho jalapeno, you may prefer the flavorful TAM Mild Jalapeno. An improved TAM Mild Jalapeno was developed in 2002 by Dr. Benigno Villalon and Dr. Kevin Crosby, producing earlier and resistant to common pepper viruses. I like the convenient and compact plant size of colorful and sweet Lunchbox Peppers. These peppers are great growing with your kiddo’s as they are sweet like a red bell pepper, produce in a variety of yellow, orange to red colors, and take on the shape and size of a large jalapeno. For large, sweet bells, you can grow California or Yolo Wonder, and I leave it up to your best judgement and tolerance for the hot pepper varieties.

Regardless of the kind of pepper you choose to consume, keep in mind that peppers produce Vitamin A and C and minerals necessary for our health. Do you have a favorite hot or sweet pepper? I invite you to share your ideas and successes by joining me for my live call-in garden show Garden Success airing weekly on Thursdays at 12 pm on KAMU-FM 90.9. Browse online to our Brazos County Master Gardeners website to download a copy of our Vegetable Garden Planting Dates at txmg.org/brazos. Keep it hot, neighbors, and I’ll see you in the garden.