The Coolest Hot & Sweet Peppers to Grow

Enter the wonderful world of extremely niche peppers

After tomatoes, peppers are my greatest garden love. They’re trickier to grow, especially in the temperate Northeast, but the rewards are worth it. And much like tomatoes, there is some truly wild breeding work happening in the pepper hobbyist world.

I’ve trawled the message boards and the niche Facebook groups to discover the weirdest and most wonderful peppers to grow this summer. Without further ado, here are my picks:

Candy Cane Chocolate Cherry

These are your classic snacking sweet peppers—perfect for dunking in hummus or eating straight—but with incredibly cool dark stripes on the fruit and variegated foliage on the plant. You eat with your eyes. You can buy seeds here.

Ke huí

This is one of the most mind-blowing peppers on the list. It's hardy down to 5 degrees F! It can get 10ft tall! It's an undomesticated wild plant! This incredible pepper is native to the subtropical mountains of South America, where it grows as a perennial forest understory shrub (so they need some shade.) The flavor is described as "spicy candy": juicy, sweet, and tangy, with heat equivalent to cayennes (although some are said to be heatless.) Requires at least 2 plants to bear fruit. You can buy seeds here.

Mattapeño & Mattapeño Mutant

The result of two random genetic mutations, these two peppers are some of the raddest looking plants around. While the peppers basically taste like jalapeños, the visual display is otherworldly. Like many variegated plants, these are both smallish, slow-growers that are sensitive to environmental conditions: the key is to baby them. You can buy seeds here (regular Mattapeño are included for free with orders over $25.)