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Legend
- Start Indoors
- Transplant
- Start Outdoors
- Care
- Harvest
- Succession Plant
Gorgeous and easy to grow!
An opulent deep purple to black leaved pepper with lustrous black "pearl" shaped fruit that gradually turn red. A gorgeous plant that gets large and bushy and darker-leaved as the warm summer weather takes hold. Amazing with golden green leaved plants, such as our salvia 'Golden Delicious' or 'Emerald Lace' sweet potato. Beware the fruit, it is edible but VERY hot.
Solanaceae Capsicum annuum
This is an example of the timeline you would see based on your growing conditions.
Tomato Hornworm
Manduca quinquemaculata
Similar to Tobacco Hornworm (Manduca sexta), these huge bizarre looking caterpillars can do a lot of damage to Tomato plants. I used to hand pick and kill them (usually with a stick as touching them didn’t appeal to me). After a time I resorted to deportation from the garden, after I realized they turn into a spectacular moth (I know the deported caterpillars may well have died with no Tomatoes to eat, but I can’t think of everything!) In recent years I haven’t done anything, as Trichogramma wasps do the job for me. Their white egg cases can be seen on the motionless and unfortunate Caterpillars - I almost feel sorry for them.
They will also eat dill and those plants are sometimes used as a trap crop to protect tomatoes.
Image: Whitney Cranshaw, Colorado State University, Bugwood.org
Last Frost Date (LFD) refers to the approximate date of the last killing frost of spring.
Example first frost date on April 08.
First Frost Date (FFD) refers to the approximate date of the first killing frost of winter.
Example first frost date on November 01.
