We trialed Habanero peppers many years ago, they simply didn’t make the cut. Both in the greenhouse and outdoors, we were unable to reliably reach full maturity within our growing season in a way that satisfied us. Usually that means we’re “done” with that variety, no second chances. It’s just a fact of life of northern growing, some things are unobtanium.
A couple years ago, one of our readers told us they had found an early Habanero that was producing. Well, we finally got some of the genetics into our trial lineup and have some good things to report! While they aren’t the most prolific pepper in the northern environment, they are maturing out quite well with weeks to spare! As we often see with peppers, our outdoor plants are producing the best whereas our greenhouse grown are lagging behind.
Hot peppers can be tough in the north, especially when you start getting into some of the hotter varieties like Habanero. While we’ve navigated this limitation just fine with varieties like the Bulgarian Carrot Pepper and highly limited other varieties, it’s true joy when we can some of the most classic hot peppers of all time to pop off in our gardens!
Not just that, but one of our favorite things about the hotter peppers is many of them feature a tropical, fruity like taste. That’s exceptionally hard to replicate with other varieties! We’re glad we can finally get that particular fruity flavor profile into our pepper repertoire. It was truly the one thing that was missing and the Bulgarian Carrot just wasn’t cutting it.
We’re almost at the point where we’ll need to expand our pepper gardens! We’ve identified so many successful varieties that do quite well for us, that we might not have a lot of space for trials next year! We’ll figure that out, I’m sure, but these are good problems for us to have! If you’re curious about the specific genetics we used, we’ve linked it in the comments!
