I'm a Pepper You're a Pepper Wouldn't You Like To Be a Pepper Too???

Every year I have an awful time starting peppers from seed and getting them to the garden.

Sometimes I think it is the seed.  Sometimes I get germination indoors early with lights and heat pads then they fail.  (Mostly because I get too busy with other things and "I" fail)...

I would love to hear about others' experience starting peppers and growing them on to maturity in the garden.

I would love to be good at growing peppers...    Hungarian Wax,  Cubanela,  Sweet Bell would be my favorites.   I have no trouble growing Jalapeno...  but there is so much more to cook with.  

Hope to hear from the Permies and Gardeners here!     Thanks.

Peppers are the one thing I consistently mess up at the seed stage too. The heat mat gets them going fine but then something goes sideways, usually me forgetting to harden them off properly or just losing track of watering when life gets busy. Hungarian wax is actually one of the more forgiving ones once they're established outside though, so if you can get them through the indoor phase you're usually okay.

Peppers are often a struggle in my ecosystem, but if I can get them past the house plant stage, I've had some good success in large pots in the garden.

This year the weather is hotter than usual, and the critters are popping up all over, probably from seeds in the compost. However, I won't know what type, or even if they'll have enough time to ripen for months yet.

The next problem is whether they will get the perfect conditions they require to set fruit?

I generally just use LOTS of seeds, since I expect lots to fail to germinate and bugs to eat most of the sprouts. We just save the seeds from the supermarket peppers all winter and in the early spring I scatter handfuls of them on a big container. They stay in the garage until they sprout then go outside.

This has worked pretty well the last few years since I started doing it this way. No tender care, no heating mats or special lights. Just an excess of seeds. Water, sunlight.

Works Okay for planting directly in the garden too. Since we save lots of seeds and are constantly buying more peppers, I just scratch a shallow furrow in the garden dirt and scatter however many seeds I have and lightly cover them. A few grow. Fresh seeds work as well as dried seeds, maybe better.

Only 'drawback' is we have no idea what variety of pepper they will be, just whatever we bought and whatever survived. Right now I have a dozen plants in small pots and a few more growing from seed directly in the garden.