Well, our shipment of pepper plants finally arrived today from Cross Country Nurseries. For several years now, we’ve made the decision to grow our peppers in containers. Part of that stems from not having a decent garden space to grow them in actual soil in the ground. For one thing, the soil here in the midwestern U.S. is terrible for peppers. It has a high clay content, which makes planting problematic unless you till the soil and add some more sand and/or peat to soften it up. That fact, plus not having any part of our yard that has dedicated space for plants like this make containers the path of least resistance.

We’ve also made the mistake in years past of getting pepper plants of varieties that we really couldn’t use or didn’t grow all that well. So, this year we decided to go back to basics and get a lot of “staple” chile peppers and see what we could do with the peppers that we know well, both from growing and cooking/preparation perspectives. Here’s what we have for this year:

2 jalapeno (a thick hybrid version)
2 chimayo
2 datil
2 serrano
2 cayenne (also a large, thick hybrid version)
1 habanero orange devil hybrid
1 Bhut Jolokia

Last year was miserable for us for the Bhut Jolokia, but we wanted to give it one more try to see if we could get any of them to grow. Here are some pics of some of the plant-lings we have waiting for transplant:

Stay tuned for how these turn out as the growing season wears on for 2008!!