Lola Pepper

Best Producer

4 plants must have given us well over 200-300 peppers until frost finally took them out. Great banana type. Hard to find peppers that produce well in NY's short and very hot and dry (yet somehow humid) summers. We had so many peppers I was able to fill many jars with salsa and my neighbor with pickled pepper rings.

Very productive, but lots of loss

Started from seed, these peppers flowered and produced earlier than my other pepper varieties, enough that I got a bumper crop. However, about 1/2 of the peppers had something like blossom end rot or sun scald (though all my peppers are shading sharing a bed with a huge ground cherry). No other pepper variety had any issues, so I don't know what was up. I was afraid to leave these on the plant long enough to turn even yellow, fortunately they are sweet and mild even when pale green, and are still good for pickling at that stage. I don't know if I'll try these again next year or not. It was a really rough year for water, as we had no rain for over two months here in Maine. I did my best to keep the beds watered, but it's likely an issue with that inconsistent watering. However, again, the peppers on either side of these did fine, not a single pepper lost.

Most of the pepper plants I got from these guys this year didn't do very well.