Chili Pepper

Sowing: Chili peppers are typically started indoors from seed six to eight weeks before the last frost date, then transplanted into the garden once all frost danger has passed, since their roots dislike being disturbed once established.

Growing conditions: They need full sun and perform best in rich, well-drained soil kept evenly and consistently moist, though established plants tolerate heat and drought. Spacing of about six to twelve inches is typical, and pinching young plants encourages a bushier, more compact habit.

Chili peppers can be troubled by aphids, whiteflies, cutworms, pepper maggots, and Colorado potato beetles. They are also susceptible to Verticillium wilt, a fungal disease, and to mosaic virus, which shows up as a uniform yellow-green mottling across the leaves followed by wilting.

Fruit forms through summer and persists on the plant until the first frost, at which point remaining pods should be picked before cold weather ends the growing season.

Culinary: Chili peppers are grown chiefly for the pungency of their fruit, a heat produced by capsaicin and related capsaicinoids, and are used as a spice across many cuisines; the range of heat and flavor among fruits is reflected in the many distinct types of chili powder made from them.

Ornamental: Some peppers are grown purely for their colorful, showy fruit and compact habit, used as bedding plants, container specimens, edging, or mass plantings; because flavor in these forms can be unpredictable, the fruit is often not eaten, and contact with children is best avoided since the fruit can be irritating.

Traditional medicine: In traditional South American and folk practice, chili pepper fruit has been used for complaints such as cough, toothache, sore throat, parasitic infection, rheumatism, and wound healing, and applied as an antiseptic, counterirritant, and appetite stimulant.

Chili peppers trace to wild Capsicum plants of present-day Peru and Bolivia, where they have been part of human diets since roughly 7500 BC, making them among the oldest cultivated crops of the Americas. Domestication proceeded independently in several regions, including east-central Mexico around 6,000 years ago, highland Peru and Bolivia, and the Amazon, with Peru remaining a center of diversity where multiple domesticated species were grown together in pre-Columbian times.

Following Columbus's 1493 voyage, chili peppers were carried to Spain and documented for their medicinal use in the Old World; unlike the tropical vine that produces black pepper, chilies could be grown in temperate climates and had become an established garden plant in Spain by the mid-1500s.