Pepper Seeds – One Rabbit Riot

In a continuation of my series highlighting the garden seeds we ordered for our 2026 garden, I’m going to combine two vegetables into one post. This post will go over our pepper seeds and seed potatoes. Below, I am including links to the previous installments of the series. Plus, here’s a post that showcases all of the seeds we ordered.

Links to Other Seeds:

Peppers

Gochugaru

We love using Gochujang in our cooking, and this is the pepper it’s made from. Gochujang is a fermented red chili paste used in Korean cuisine, and while it’s spicy, it still has flavor. We’re really excited to grow these seeds. The peppers grow to four inches long and are narrow. Our seeds come from Sow True Seed.

pepper seeds, garden seeds — Our pepper seeds for 2026.

Jaluv an Attitude

Each year, Fedco Seeds designates one seed as their Seed Without a Price variety. It’s usually a seed with a unique backstory, and any profit that they would normally earn for the seed goes into their Seed Farmers Resilience Fund. This money is used to help Fedco’s seed farmers who face crop and livelihood disruptions. This year’s Seed Without a Price is the Jaluv an Attitude pepper. It’s a hot pepper that was developed by a breeder named Relentless. It looks like a jalapeno with a thicker skin and the flavor of a jalapeno. Jalapenos can be hit or miss for me. I love jalapeno poppers, preserving them into cowboy candy, and throwing them into salsa. But it isn’t a pepper I reach for just to add spice to a dish. That being said, I’m still really excited to grow these.

Takii’s New Ace

For our sweet pepper for 2026, I wanted a red, orange, or yellow bell pepper that matures quickly and succeeds in cool weather. Neither of us is a big fan of green bell peppers since they are often bitter and can lead to stomach aches. We tend to have inconsistent spring and summer weather where we live, so it’s hard to trust that we’ll have a hot summer that peppers love. Takii’s New Ace seems like the perfect pepper. It sets fruit in cool weather and has high disease resistance. Our seeds come from Pinetree Gardens.

West Indies Red Habanero

I love Jamaican jerk chicken, which traditionally uses Scotch Bonnet peppers. Unfortunately, Scotch Bonnet peppers and their seeds are difficult to find. Last year, Baker Creek sold them, but this year, they weren’t on their website. The West Indies Red Habanero was the closest variety I could find and happened to also be offered by Baker Creek. I’m curious to know if we can successfully grow this variety since it requires hot weather and lots of sunshine, but I think it’s possible.

Potatoes

We had some difficulty sourcing seed potatoes this year. In 2022, we ordered from Fedco and had great success growing them in containers. Last year, we ordered from Fedco and High Mowing because Fedco had sold out of some of the varieties we wanted. We weren’t able to harvest any potatoes, and the ones we received from Fedco were moldy and rotten when they arrived.

So, this year, we weren’t sure if we wanted to give Fedco another try. There’s a chance we could receive rotten potatoes again, plus their shipping costs are very high. High Mowing didn’t have all the varieties we wanted, and their prices are high since they’re all organic. That led me to search the web for specific seed potato varieties and resulted in me finding Urban Farmer, a seed company located in Indiana. We bought all our seeds from them.

Adirondack Blue

This midseason potato has blue skin and blue flesh and retains its color through the cooking process. The Adirondack Blue potato has antioxidants that can lower the risk of heart and neurological diseases. This potato is a fresh-eating variety with a short storage life.

German Butterball

The German Butterball potato is a quintessential late-season potato. It has yellow skin and flesh and is great for roasting and frying. It also stores well.

Magic Molly

The Magic Molly potato is one of the most beautiful varieties you can grow and eat. It’s a late-season fingerling with purple skin and flesh. We recently bought a bag of these from the store, and they made wonderful smashed potatoes. We grew these in 2022 and were amazed at their flavor.

Red Norland

The Red Norland is a wonderful early-season red-skinned potato. They are delicious, uniform in size, and store fairly well. My preferred way to eat them is boiled with butter, sour cream, salt, and pepper.

What are your favorite potato varieties to grow, if you grow your own potatoes? Also, have you had success growing hot peppers? If so, please share any tips.

Peppers Have Been Started

I don’t believe that each year’s garden has started until your hands first touch soil in the spring. Buying seeds and purchasing supplies is wonderful, but it’s all still part of the planning process. Getting your hands dirty for the first time moves everything from a concept to a reality. And that’s the step we took Saturday evening.

Seed starting, gardening — Seed Starting

Earlier in the day on Saturday, we made a trip to the nearest Lowes to pick up a downspout extension and grabbed a couple of bags of seed starting mix, another seed starting tray and flat of cells, and gardening gloves. Brief side story: Neither of us could remember if we needed extra seed starting cells. I would have bet a dollar that we had enough to get us started for the year and only bought the new cells as extra. Boy, am I glad we got them. When we came home, I checked our gardening tote, and the starting tray that I thought had cells in it was empty. It’s funny how taking a two-year absence from gardening and moving can make you forget stuff.

That evening, we unpacked our heat mats and glow light, set up the table we’re using, and ran an extension cord from the nearest outlet. First up on our seed-starting schedule is peppers. (Technically, our mustard greens should already be in the ground, but because they will be directly sown, we have to wait until the ground is tilled). We found our 3 varieties of peppers (California Wonder bells, Scotch Bonnets, and Hungarian Waxes, which I discussed in this post), grabbed our seed-starting mix, and filled a spray bottle with water.

We decided to grow 3 cells each of Scott Bonnets and Hungarian Wax peppers and 6 cells of the California Wonders. With 2 seeds in each cell, we’re confident we’ll get strong seedlings to transplant later in the spring. Determining how many cells of each variety to start is always a fun process. You want enough to guarantee good germination but not so many that you feel overwhelmed if all of them succeed. Hot peppers are particularly difficult for us because we don’t eat a lot of them and will mostly use the Scotch Bonnets for jerk marinade. We went with 3 cells with the goal of transplanting 2 of them, and if all 3 succeed, we’ll give the third plant away. For the California Wonder bell peppers, we’ll probably transplant as many as we can.

What’s Next?

Next week, we will be starting our eggplant seeds. I’ve been using the seed starting spreadsheet that I created to organize everything and started another page to track the dates and expected germination times for each seed. That will allow us to know if a seed is taking longer than expected to germinate.

We’re also going to be buying our rototiller sometime over the next week. We’re big fans of no-till gardening, but our yard is currently all grass, so we have to break ground. We were originally going to buy an electric tiller since they are cheaper than gas models and we won’t need to use it much after the first year. However, after realizing how expensive 100-foot heavy-gauge extension cords are, we have pivoted to a gas model. We’re still narrowing down the exact one, but I’ll write a blog post about it and how we reached that decision when we get it. I’ll also write a follow-up post reviewing the tiller once we use it. Spring weather is finally starting to arrive after a harsh winter, and we couldn’t be more excited.

Happy gardening!

Tag: Pepper Seeds

Our 2026 Garden Seeds: Peppers & Potatoes