The Best Small Pepper Plants To Grow If You Have Limited Garden Space

If you have visions of vegetables growing in tidy rows, laden with a harvest of healthy food for your table, having limited garden space can be a heartbreaker. But you don't need to squash your dreams of bounty. Pepper plants, including the smallest varieties adapted by horticulturists for tight spaces, are prolific producers of both sweet and spicy fruit. Many of the hundreds of cultivars of the five domesticated species of peppers (Capsicum spp.) can be grown in small spaces, including the most compact plants like the 'Spicy Jane Red' hybrid Ponky pepper, 'Pot-a-Peno', 'Basket of Fire', and 'Chilly Chili'. They are easy-to-grow vegetables for a container garden.

In addition to the pleasure of having a ready supply of fresh ingredients for your culinary masterpieces, pepper plants have colorful blossoms that brighten your garden and attract pollinators. Their dense green foliage adds visual interest to the smallest spot. With enough light, compact pepper plants grown in containers indoors will continue to produce a crop after your outdoor plants have died back.

Named one of the top 10 summer container plants, 'Pot-a-Peno' is a 12 to 15 inch tall hybrid jalapeno that grows well in small gardens, containers, and raised beds. The fruit have the same mild heat as traditional jalapenos at 5,000 Scoville units, the scale used to measure the spiciness of peppers. Eat the peppers green or allow them to mature to an attention-grabbing bright red. Bred for hanging baskets, 'Basket of Fire' was named a Texas Superstar for its bountiful harvest and ease of propagation. They grow about a foot tall with fruit that matures from yellow to red. At 80,000 Scoville units, the 1 to 2 inch peppers are hot, but not blisteringly so.

An All-America Annual Selection winner, 'Chilly Chili' grows only a foot tall at the most and 6 to 10 inches wide. The non-spicy, two-inch-long fruit are edible, but are frequently grown simply for their colorful displays of green, orange, and red. 'Chilly Chili' is a prolific plant, setting hundreds of fruit through the growing season. The 'Spicy Jane Red' hybrid Ponky pepper grows about 20 inches tall and about two feet wide. The 3 to 4 inch fruit start out yellow and mild but turn red and get hotter as they mature to a final Scoville reading of 5,000 units.

Pepper plants grown in containers or small gardens need lots of light to produce plentiful mature fruit, so make sure your garden patch or container location gets six to eight hours of direct, not indirect, sun a day. Plants grown in indirect sun are unlikely to produce peppers or fully develop their pungent flavor. The best type of soil for growing veggies is typically fertile soil with lots of organic matter. However, peppers can tolerate less than ideal planting material and a little bit of neglect. If you're growing peppers in containers or in a raised bed, keep the soil moist but not soggy. In a small garden, they'll need 1 to 2 inches of water a week.

Peppers are ready to harvest when they're firm and shiny, and it's easy to break them off the stem, but most can be left unpicked to continue to mature and change color. Generally, sweet peppers left on the vine become sweeter and hot peppers get hotter. Once harvested, peppers can be frozen, canned, dried, or pickled.