Growing Guide
The Raddest Peppers of 2026
By Debra Austin
Published April 9, 2026
The short version
The most interesting peppers to grow this year are not the hottest. They are the ones nobody on your block has heard of. Our five: Aji Charapita, Fish Pepper, Black Cobra, Brazilian Starfish and Zebrange. Four sit in medium heat by our bands and one runs hot.
Forget the heat arms race for a minute. Records get broken every few years and the pepper that held the title in 2013 is a curiosity now. What does not go stale is a pod shaped like a starfish, a plant with white streaked leaves, or a yellow berry from the Peruvian Amazon that costs a fortune dried and grows perfectly well in a pot. None of these are ours. We buy the seed and grow them out, same as you would.
Aji Charapita
Capsicum chinense. About 30,000 to 100,000 SHU, which our bands call hot. A wild chile from the Amazonian north of Peru, around Tarapoto and San Martin, where it grows without anybody planting it. The pods are pea sized and bright yellow, closer to a berry than a pepper, and a single bushy plant throws hundreds of them.
The flavour is why people chase it. It opens bright and citrusy the way a good chinense does, then the heat arrives fast and leaves cleanly instead of sitting on you. Dried and sold by weight it turns up in articles about the world's most expensive spice, which is a marketing story more than a horticultural one. The plant itself is small, slow to get going, and perfectly happy in a pot on a sunny sill.
Ours sell out and come back. Nothing is on the shelf as this goes up. Aji Charapita on WikiPepper .
Fish Pepper
Capsicum annuum. About 5,000 to 30,000 SHU, medium by our bands. A nineteenth century heirloom tied to Black cooking around Baltimore and the Chesapeake, where it went into the cream sauces that came with fish and crab. It nearly disappeared before seed savers pulled it back.
The plant is the draw. Its leaves come variegated, streaked white through green, and the pods run the whole way from white to green to orange striped to red, so one plant carries four colours at once. In a white sauce the unripe pods add heat without turning it pink, which is exactly why cooks wanted them.
It is the most forgiving thing on this list. It crops hard in a 5 gallon pot and keeps going until the cold stops it. Fish Pepper seedlings are on the shelf now, and there is a record on WikiPepper .
Black Cobra
Capsicum annuum. About 15,000 to 35,000 SHU, medium by our bands. Dark foliage and clusters of small pods that stand up off the plant rather than hanging, ripening from deep purple black through to red. It reads as an ornamental until you eat one and it corrects you.
Compact enough for a patio pot and one of the better choices if you want something that earns its place on a shelf indoors over winter. We have never listed it, so this one is a recommendation rather than a sales pitch. Black Cobra on WikiPepper .
Brazilian Starfish
Capsicum baccatum. About 10,000 to 30,000 SHU, medium by our bands. The pods flatten out and throw pointed lobes from the centre, so a ripe one sitting on a board genuinely looks like a starfish. It is the strangest shape in the shop and the reason people stop at the table at a market.
Baccatums are the workhorses of this catalogue and this one behaves like the rest of them: tall, late, and enormously productive once it starts. The flavour is sweet and fruity with a moderate bite, and the shape survives drying, so flakes off this plant look like something you bought on purpose.
The established plants are gone, but Brazilian Starfish Orange seedlings are in stock, which is the same shape in a different colour. Brazilian Starfish on WikiPepper .
Zebrange
Capsicum baccatum. About 8,000 to 25,000 SHU, medium by our bands. Long tapered pods striped red over orange, close enough to painted that people assume the photo has been got at. Another prolific baccatum, sweet and fruity, and one of the few peppers we grow that is worth a spot purely on how it looks hanging on the branch.
Like every baccatum it wants a long season and a big pot, and it will keep setting pods long after an annuum has given up. Zebrange seedlings are on the shelf in small numbers. Zebrange on WikiPepper .
How to pick a weird one
Pick the species before you pick the name. A baccatum like the Starfish or the Zebrange wants a long season and rewards you with a plant that will not stop producing. An annuum like the Fish sets earlier and finishes earlier, which matters if your summer is short. A wild chinense like the Charapita takes the longest of the lot to get going and asks for patience you might not have in a first season.
Then be honest about your pot. Every one of these will grow in a gallon and none of them will give you much in one. Five to seven gallons is where a baccatum starts behaving like the plant it is supposed to be. Heat is the last thing to worry about: four of these five sit in the same medium band, and the difference between them on the plate is flavour and shape, not burn.
The point
Anyone can chase the next record. The peppers that make a season worth having are the ones with a story behind them, a shape you have to explain to guests, or a flavour you cannot buy in a shop at any price. Grow one strange plant this year. It costs the same as a sensible one.
Questions people ask
Want to grow one?
We raise everything from seed in South Texas. Seedlings are what we are shipping this season, and the shelf changes every couple of months.
Species and Scoville ranges from our own catalogue data and the WikiPepper records linked above. Heat labels use our bands, which sit differently from the wiki's on purpose. Stock checked the day this went up and it moves.