Sweet pepper is one of the most commonly grown vegetable crops in our country. Even despite the demanding conditions of care, the popularity of this vegetable is only growing every year. The main reason for this is the taste and benefits of its sweet fruit. There are quite a few varieties of this crop, but among them there are several dozen of the most popular. One of them is the Ox's Ear sweet pepper variety.
Characteristics of the variety
This variety of sweet pepper is one of the best mid-season varieties. The harvest of its peppers will reach technical maturity in 96-100 days, and the entire cycle until the fruits fully ripen will take about 125 days.
The plants are of medium size, their height does not exceed 70 cm.
The Ox's Ear pepper is shaped like an elongated cone. Its dimensions are quite large: length can vary from 12 to 16 cm with a weight of up to 200 grams. During the period of technical maturity, the fruits of this variety are dark green in color, and when they reach biological maturity, they are rich red with a glossy sheen.
This sweet pepper has quite fleshy pulp with a wall thickness of up to 6-7 mm. Its distinctive feature is that it does not taste bitter even when unripe. This pepper variety has universal uses.It is equally good in salads and in homemade preparations. According to most housewives, Ox's ear is an ideal variety for homemade treatment.
This variety of sweet pepper has excellent resistance to many diseases, and especially to the tobacco mosaic virus. It has a fairly high and stable yield. If you follow agrotechnical recommendations, you can harvest up to 3 kg of crop from one square meter. Ox's ear is one of those varieties that retain their marketability and taste well during storage and transportation.
Recommendations for cultivation
Sweet pepper of this variety is grown through seedlings. They start preparing it in mid-March.
This technique will allow you to immediately accustom young plants to the soil where they will have to grow, thereby minimizing the stress of replanting.
The process of preparing seeds for Ox's Ear seedlings includes several stages:
- Selection of living seeds. To do this, all the seeds are immersed in water, and the floating dummy seeds are selected. They do not contain a sprout, so they are not worth planting.
- Soaking the seeds for several days.
- Treating seeds with a weak solution of potassium permanganate, followed by washing them with warm water.
Seeds that have undergone such preparation will be able to sprout faster and will already have a certain immunity. They are planted in a substrate prepared in advance, and then covered with film until shoots emerge.
Therefore, it is better to plant seeds in separate containers of 2-3 pieces.After emergence, weak shoots must be removed, leaving one strong one.
Ready vegetable seedlings of this variety can be planted both in open beds and in a greenhouse. When planting, it should be taken into account that the best predecessors will be:
- green manure;
- legumes;
- cucumbers;
- all plants of the cruciferous family and others.
It is not recommended to plant Ox's Ear seedlings after tomatoes. And if there are no other options, then the soil needs to be dug up in the fall with any organic fertilizer.
Otherwise, the care requirements for this variety are the same as for all peppers:
- Lots of light and warmth. Moreover, if the peppers are planted in a greenhouse, then it is necessary to ventilate. If this is not done, the plants’ flowers and ovaries will fall off.
- Watering with warm water. The frequency of watering depends on weather conditions, but at least 2 waterings per week. Before flowering, rain watering is preferable, and from the beginning of flowering until the end of the growing season, only at the root. The norm is 1 to 2 liters of water per plant.
- Regular loosening and weeding. You can skip this maintenance step if you mulch the bed of pepper plants.
- Fertilizing with mineral and organic fertilizers. Good results are achieved by using bird droppings, slurry, and superphosphate.
If these recommendations are followed, the Ox's Ear variety will bear fruit abundantly until the end of September.
You can learn more about growing sweet peppers from the video:
