"we like the ones that look like they should be hot but aren't"

This one was discussed a few days ago here -

Habanada pepper - looks exactly like the violently hot Habanero, but has zero heat. Habaneros have a lot of flavor - fruity, flora, sweet, if you can detect it under their insane heat. These Habanadas have all the same flavor, without the heat. Was just developed a few years ago from Habaneros. Available at many vendors. I have not tried it, but will next year. Lots of suppliers have it. https://smallfarms.cornell.edu/2015/04/habanada/

I saw that one ... does anyone know if it's productive? Also, does no heat mean actually no heat, like other sweet peppers? Or just comparably no heat? I like to share with my guinea pigs, so mild isn't adequate.

Thinking about it, "looks like a hot pepper" probably isn't a great shape/size descriptor, since they're all pretty different. Jalapeño to poblano shaped/sized is what I was thinking. Habanada does fit the bill ... but I would love to know if it's better than something like a lunchbox, how it produces, etc. We've had some real duds in the past.

For peppers, I'd recommend Biscayne cubanelle or Goddess banana peppers, should fit the bill.

Hello

I plants 20 - 25 varieties every year. I have the luxury of a greenhouse to start the plants. I'd make a few suggestions:

1) Sun Gold and Sweet Millions are both wonderful sweet cherries. They both produce well and for a long time. They grow fast so your short seasons will be fine. Tey will crack if you don't water consistently but all cherries will do that. Let them ripen on te plant for the best taste.

2) Stupice for a medium sized red. Produces the earliest in my garden. The taste and consistency are wonderful.

3) Mexican Midget is great for a small cherry on a small bush.

Get a small electrified fence - keep the critters away. Mine is solar driven through a panel and a battery.

Doc

Since you like small tomatoes and grow in containers, I think you would LOVE Maglia Rosa. It was my favourite for taste last season. I grow them in 3 gallon sized pots and they don't get much over 3' tall. They have the most beautiful bi-colour pink/yellow fruits which are bullet shaped. They are quite early, and the best thing about them early in the season is that they can be enjoyed as soon as they blush! I actually prefer the taste when they are fully ripe, but the breeder suggests eating them at an earlier stage. Seeds can be bought from Artisan Seeds. Another great tomato from the same breeder is Blush. It's taller and has similar yellow-red fruits. The only thing to be concerned about is that both varieties have wispy foliage. There is nothing wrong with it, but it can look a bit droopy and cause concern to those who do not know this fact.

Maglia Rosa appealed to me! Glad to hear its good! I clicked the notify me button on one site, as they were sold out ... hopefully they'll notify me so I can order, but I'll check out Artisan Seeds.

We had SunGold last year, and the plant was pretty big. It also had tougher skin for some reason. The Esterina next to it didn't have same tougher skin issue but did share the sprawling issue. We've got some a couple SunPeaches this year.

I'll have to check out Stupice and Mexican Midget, I'm not familiar with either.

Likewise, I'll look into those peppers, Peter.

Re how-hot-is-a-Habanada, the writeups I've seen (just Google it) all say NO HEAT. Check this out. The Scoville scale is a measure of how hot peppers are.

http://www.pepperseeds.eu/scoville

Habaneros are 30,000

Serranos are 10,000

Poblano/Jalapenos are 3,000

Bell peppers and Habanadas are ZERO!

Re productivity, they're bred from Habaneros, and Habaneros are plenty productive. As for all peppers, you need HEAT. It looks exactly like a Habanero, and no, Habaneros don't all look different. I have friends that adore Habaneros, and these things will freak them out.

Great, it'll go on the list, then!

i asked because I was looking on some site at a different sweet pepper born of hot peppers, and it boasted how their strain never had hot peppers while others of the variety occasionally threw out a hot one ... that variety didn't make the list because of that and because it seemed the peppers might be too big for how we use them. We do always taste before the guinea pigs get a piece of anything - wouldn't want to give them something not suited to them for their sake and ours (no wasting peppers on those that won't like them!).

3 peppers I would choose...

Violet Sparkle are a real neat pepper. Plants are always rather small but productive. Smallish peppers are medium thickness, start out yellow-green, turn purple streaked, then ripen sweet burgundy red.

Jimmy Nardello Italian Pepper is a long thin walled twisted very sweet Italian pepper that look like large cayenne. Very productive and ripen to red quickly. The plants always seem to stay kind of short and bushy compared to other larger Italian peppers.

Lipstick Pepper has very sweet juicy peppers that ripen dependably on a medium sized plant that always seems to stay tidy.

The ideal tomato doesn't exist, but it helps me to know you liked Green Zebra. iirc, tomatoes I've grown that might work ok for you are Stupice, Sophie's Choice, Early Wonder, Taxi.... For sweet peppers, do you like the sweet minis like Lunchbox? ETA, I see you listed it. Good choice. lol! :)

I thought of another compact tomato that would probably do well in a pot. I grow it in the garden in a tomato cage. Bulgarian Triumph. It has very tasty red saladette tomatoes which look like the "vine ripened" ones you buy in the store, but these have flavor :).

Linda

Along the line of peppers that LOOK hot, but really aren't, "Jalapeno Fooled You" has been around for a while. Flavor and appearance of jalapenos but no heat. Scoville = 0. Along the same lines, I believe there is also a Coolapeño. But Jalapeno's have a vegetable-y flavor, which is not my fave. On the other hand, an edible hab sounds delicious.

rbrt, those sound great, and some I hadn't seen yet. Thanks!

party_music50, I hear you on the ideal tomato! When we started planting our veggies this season, though, we realized we planned poorly and have a lot of larger plants ... and it didn't help that the chocolate cherries seriously took off, by the time we could get them outside (weather), they already needed a second tier of caging, though the most concerning is probably that they're not even supposed to be the biggest. We probably should have read Shimmer's description better, but plants were selling out fast when we were ordering back in January, so we rushed a bit, and then we started what we had on hand for seeds in March, which meant Chocolate Cherry and SunPeach, which aren't little either ... haha oops. We're trying to plan better for next year. That and it's about time we get new seeds, since a bunch of them are from like 2015-2017.

I ran across Green Zebra at the farmer's market last year and picked up based on descriptions and recommendations. It was great! It took us a few tomatoes to figure out what was fully ripe. The key is to wait for it to get golden striping on top, and they get better when the gold starts blushing a bit. They're decent if you pick them early, but they're really good when fully ripe. That's a second vote for Stupice ... I'm beginning to think I've been under a rock not to have heard of it ... or maybe just tangled in a SunGold, haha.

Lunchbox is a must have for us! We've grown that one every year. Yummy is our other go-to, though it's been harder to find recently.

We've had great success with Sungold for a cherry and Shimmer for salad tomato. We've also had chocolate cherry. We had Stupice a couple of years ago and really liked those, too. I got them from a neighbor who has since moved overseas. Those were nice salad tomatoes. We have way better luck with small and medium tomatoes than larger varieties.

For peppers, we like the Burpee Thunderbolt. It's a nice sweet pepper not bell shaped-it's a longer pepper. Very nice and grows well in containers.

Burpee Thunderbolt

You also might want to look into shishito type of peppers. We have these from Burpee also. It says they're hot, but they're not, though occasionally you will find one that is hotter than the others. They are super good blistered in oil with sesame seeds. Also grow great in containers. They are out of stock at Burpee, but you can probably find something else.

Burpee Dragon peppers

Just popping in to say I grew Habanada last year and it was one of my most productive. I didn't actually like the taste, but it'll probably suit your needs well!

Just out of curiosity, what did the Habanada taste like? What didn't you like about it? Did it have a Habanero taste?

@Lyla Which peppers do you like the flavor of? What made Habanada unappealing?

With regard to small tomato plants, while I do grow Maglia Rosa, I mostly grow "dwarf project" tomatoes in containers (Earthboxes), and they only grow about four feet tall. They come in a wide range of colors, sizes, and flavors. I have not grown cherries, but I've grown some about four ounces, and some as big as a pound. My favorite is probably Mallee Rose, and a lot of people love Rosella Purple. Secret Sauce is my favorite dwarf for sauce

Dwarf Tomato Project

For non-bell sweets I'd have to agree with cubanelles, and some of the named varieties ( I think Biscayne is one, and Aruba) are worth starting from seed. I also like the "bulls horn" peppers, or "Corno Di Toro" which are thinned skinned, sweet, and can be used or fried. They ripen to yellow, orange, or red. This year I got my seeds from Johnny's, but in December.

Cubanelle varieties

Johnny's Corno Di Toros

If you like the aroma of habanero or other "chineneses" peppers without the heat, there are also "seasoning" peppers, like Trinidad perfume, or Aji dulce.

About seasoning peppers

The Corno di Toro types are great, really are sweet peppers at their best, but when I plant in ground they grow tall and tend to have branches flop. The original Corno di Toro sends branches 5 feet high. Be hard to deal with in containers.

Pepperoncini are thin walled Italian small peppers on a small plants, very mild "hot". Rather bland fresh, but productive.

Not sure if Blueberry really means actual not hot versions of "hot" peppers. Peppers have a lot of variance, not sure why in the US most of what you see is bells and pale yellow frying peppers.

Biquinho Pepper

Here is a mild cute pepper, related to Habaneros I think. Would make a nice container plant. I'm trying this for the first time this year. Looks ornamental, see how they are to eat.

Interesting reading and resource on the dwarf tomato project. I'm definitely bookmarking that.

I don't really know much about the aroma of a habanero, as I don't eat hot peppers. I'm a bit confused by seasoning peppers ... mild pepper to me still just means its a hot pepper variety; I see that aji dulce would translate to sweet pepper, but it's still talking about a touch of heat in the rest of the article. Any heat is a no go for me and the guinea pigs. Mild heat could go to my mum, but she'd rather have sweet, too, generally, as they're better for snacks and salads.

Correct ... It doesn't have to relate to any hot pepper. I just know a lot of people mistake the peppers we grow for hot and that we've been less than thrilled with most every regular bell shaped pepper we've grown. Nikita was nice for a bell, and it did get to reprise it role the following year, but it was big, didn't perform quite as well the second year, and didn't make us as happy as ones like Yummy, so it was deemed to be not worth taking up tomato-sized space. We did also have an interesting variety, I think it was calling itself Purple Beauty, though the bells came out pretty small and thin-walled, so I don't know if that was labelled correctly, but they were quite tart, not hot or bitter, but definitely a tart sweet pepper. Most of the other bell shaped ones have just been underwhelming.

I was looking at the Corno di Toros and Cornitas ... it seemed like there were a lot of them, but I couldn't really figure out which would be better, as it seemed to mostly be a matter of color, and I still haven't figured out whether it matters if the lunchbox pepper is a red or orange variety, though we usually don't have multiple colors in the same year. Anyone done a direct comparison between different colors of a variety?

Guinea pigs eat sweet peppers. They're an excellent source of vitamin C for them.

@BlueberryBundtcake - 6a/5b MA, I generally like most peppers! I haven't tried a lot of chinense peppers other than habanero/habanada though and i wonder if i'm not a big fan of their underlying flavor. Since habanada just tastes like habanero without the heat.

Last year my two favorite sweet thin-walled peppers were Purple Marconi and Zavory. Marconis didn't germinate at first, out of about 20 seeds I only managed to get 2 plants, and they were super-late, compared to all my other peppers, but they gave me two harvests of bunches of peppers! The plant was not very big, and it was amazing to see how many rather large pods can this small plant hold! Almost black peppers were also quite tasty.

Zavory was completely heatless to me, it was very tasty and prolific, although it took a lot of time to push first pods. Oh wait, no, it had one pod and then I managed to get a second harvest, which finished ripening in my garage, because it was too cold outside. But it was loaded with pods the second time! I think I should've started it earlier.

I also used to grow Jimmy Nardello and highly recommend it, super-prolific, very tasty and ripens quickly.

As for tomatoes, per your description I can only think of Minigold. I bought seeds on ebay from Ukraine last year and this plant is amazing! It's compact (didn't grow over standart 3-ring tomato cage), loaded with sweet cherry tomatoes, kept producing well into cold and fruits didn't crack. Tumbling Tom was also very productive to me, but I can't remember if there was cracking or not.

One more compact-ish tomato I used to grow was Cyril's Choice. Now that I think about it, I don't even know why I stopped growing it... I think I got carried away with new varieties once I put raised beds in place and wasn't concerned about my tomatoes being compact any more. But it was one of the first to fruit, and very prolific!

This tomato plant doesn't check all your boxes but I'd recommend "Mountain Magic".

Size of a golf ball. (way easier to pick then cherry's)

sweet and tasty. (not as sweet as cherry but good)

keeps very well. (best I've seen, weeks sitting on counter, better then romas)

Heavy producer. (I got 297 from one plant last year.)

Resistant to fungus. ( Best I ever grew, this one isn't touched while others next to it wilt)

NO cracks, repeat none. ( of the 297 picked about a doz cracked from over ripening.)

Versatile (snacks, salads, 2 or 3 sliced for sandwiches, processing, roasting whole)

Low acid but normal skin.

These are the first I get to pick and the last I pick until the first killing frost.

Can grow in a container. (I grow plants for 3 other people who grow in big pots but they will get over 6 feet tall )

Seeds are 50 cents each. (Only con I can think of, a pound of seed is worth $10,000)

Two smaller Italian bulls-horn type peppers which have really produced for me in recent years are cornito rosso (ripens red) and cornito giallo (ripens yellow). Incredibly productive, great flavor and size. Do well in containers.

So in case anyone was wondering, I did order a number of seeds. I ordered from Tomato Growers Supply Company, whom I hadn't ordered from before, but they had a lot in stock, the ordering went smoothly, and the seeds arrived quickly packaged nicely. I got tomatoes (obviously), peppers, and a lettuce, which I'll start when it's not around 90°F.

I bought:

Healthy Kick (3', 4oz), Maglia Rosa (3', 3oz), Matina (4', 2-6oz), Mint Julep (4', 1-2oz - pear shaped mutation of Green Zebra), Principe Borghese (4', 2oz), Silvery Fir Tree (4', 4-6oz), and Sprite (3', 1oz) for tomatoes.

Cornito Giallo (6" yellow fruit), Jimmy Nardello (10" thin red fruit), and Yum-Yum II (2.5" fruit) for sweet peppers.

The lettuce I got is Tom Thumb, which is a mini butterhead variety.

Matina and Principe Borghese might not make the cut for growing 2021, since we'll be repeating Sunpeach (we managed to accidentally stunt one of this year and hope to repeat that intentionally by giving it the same light changes) and Extreme Bush (<3' plant, 3oz great meaty tomatoes) and also doing a number of paste tomatoes - Striped Roman, San Marzano, and Grandma Mary's Paste (new variety for us ... I tried to get it this year, but the plant ended up not being available) are looking likely ... they have their spaces designated for where they done well and fit well.