There is something so fabulously eye-catching about purple bell peppers, don’t you think? They’re so dark, they’re nearly black.
I grew quite a lot of peppers in the garden this year but I thought Halloween week would be an appropriate time to tell you about growing purple sweet bell pepper since they’re so delightfully spooky looking (and since I’m still harvesting fruit well into October!).
Imagine if you had a whole raised bed garden with eggplant, purple sweet bell peppers, red romaine, and purple basil. Now that would be a haunted veggie garden! I got this Purple Beauty transplant from Bonnie Plants and couldn’t wait to see if the fruit really looked like the picture!
About Purple Beauty Peppers
Only the outside of the purple sweet bell pepper is dark. The inside of the pepper is green. This is a very tasty pepper, sweet and tender. I’ve loved cooking with it all summer! None of the fruit have gotten nearly as big as my green and red peppers, but the plant has produced a ton of peppers so I don’t mind smaller fruit.
Because of its unusual appearance, it would be a striking addition to a veggie tray. They’re also perfect for salads!
I grew a row of six peppers on stakes this year: two red bell peppers, two yellow bell peppers, this purple bell pepper, and a jalapeño plant. While tomatoes are pretty spent by late fall here in my Texas garden, the peppers are still going strong and they’ll keep producing until the first frost.
You really get a lot of bang for buck with peppers, especially considering that bell peppers are kind of expensive at a grocery store! I’ve lost track of how many peppers I’ve grown the past six months. Dozens!
Staking Bell Peppers
The reason for staking peppers is simple: the fruit weighs down the little pepper plants, causing them to topple over. Use garden twine to attach the stalk of each plant to the stake for support when fruit appears. (Note: you don’t need to set out the cages and stakes as early as I did. I set it up early because I wanted to show you the spacing of my summer vegetable garden.)
I planted this purple sweet bell pepper in late March (I live in zone 8) but could have easily planted it as late as May. Purple sweet bell peppers need full sun and love a raised bed. Peppers do really well here in the south.
This particular pepper plant does well with high heat and humidity. Like many peppers, the plant grows about 18-24″ tall and about 20″ wide, so you can fit quite a few in a raised bed garden.
Water & Fertilizer
I water my garden every six weeks with Seaweed Magic, which makes fruit and vegetables even sweeter than homegrown produce already is. Other than that I fed the garden with Miracle Gro Shake n Feed every three months. It’s so easy to use!
Peppers are pretty low maintenance and don’t have many pest problems. This was a very easy plant to grow that produced an abundance of gorgeous fruit so I will definitely be planting it again!
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