If you’ve read our guide on growing northern peppers, you probably know that we don’t advocate for growing traditional bell peppers outdoors at extreme northern latitudes.
Put simply, we’ve found the yields to be quite low and also full maturation is extremely tough on these larger pepper varieties. We’ve seen this across pretty much all “cold climate” focused bells, they just don’t perform well like they would at lower latitudes. We’ve seen a little bit of success here and there, but it’s highly season dependent.
So, that’s really opened up a big hole for us and is not to say we’ve forgone all sweet peppers. We’ve been playing with these “Mini Bell” varieties now for a couple of seasons and there are some things to like about them. We’ve tried both red and yellow varieties, and while the red seems to be fastest to mature, both can fully mature in our cool outdoor growing spaces.
While this variety also isn’t prolific when grown at our latitude, we’d rather have a good shot at maturity over both low yield and immature. They still don’t make our “fully recommended” list, but definitely should be on the short list of pepper growers that insist on that “bell type” being in their repertoire.
We’re glad to see our peppers starting to mature in this relatively cool and challenging season. This is definitely an important thing for us as we’d rather see variance in yield than variance in maturity overall. These Mini Bells could probably be grown quite densely, given their small stature, perhaps four to a square foot to really up that yield in subarctic gardens.
