Growing Cubanelle Peppers 2012

According to my analytics report, most people who come to my blog are usually doing a search on cubanelle peppers. I don't know why, but I'll go with the flow. I've enjoyed cubanelle peppers since discovering them at my local produce store a few years back. Twice, I was able to get plants from the plant nurseries to grow them in my garden. 

This year, I decided to grow all my peppers from seed. I bought my seeds from Burpee.com. I bought jalapeno, pasilla and poblano seeds, and proceeded to forget about cubanelles! I started growing my seeds early, since we had such a mild winter. When I realized I forgot the cubanelle peppers, the plant nurseries were starting to get their plants in. I waited and waited to no avail. This was the one year the stores decided not to carry cubanelle plants. I immediately sent for the seeds. 

By the time it came time to planting (around Mother's Day), my other pepper plant seedlings that I grew were fairly large, while my poor cubanelles were still pretty tiny. We put them all into the ground and waited to see what would happen. The cubanelles actually took off and caught up with my other pepper plants. It was wonderful to see!

Planted cubanelles grown from seed around Mother's Day.

This was one of our cubanelle plants in mid-June.

Big leaves which hung down the plant.

Cubanelle pepper plant at the end of June.

The hanging leaves were getting stronger!

These cubanelle plants got to be 3 feet tall

and were constantly loaded with peppers.

We got an early frost in September, but the cubanelle plants continued to

produce blossoms up until the time we finally pulled them out mid-October.

This is just one bunch of peppers during a week in early August.

Enough to make a large batch of pasta sauce with.

The cubanelle pepper is a nice stir-fry pepper. A little sweet with just a touch of heat. My favorite thing to do with them is to chop them up and fry them in a little olive oil with diced shallots and add to my homemade spaghetti sauce. Cubanelle peppers really add such a wonderful flavor!