Mama Mia Giallo Hybrid Sweet Pepper Seeds

Days to Maturity: 85 from transplant

All-America Selections (AAS) Winner 2014

Gorgeous color and even better flavor.

Mama Mia, that's a delicious pepper. Say hello to the award-winning Italian sweet pepper with bright golden yellow skin, heavy yields, a compact habit, great disease resistance, and early maturity. It's the pepper that has it all—and we haven't even started talking about the flavor yet.

Mama Mia Giallo sets more than 2 dozen long, tapered peppers on every compact plant. They reach 7 to 9 inches long and weigh in at about 2 to 4 ounces each. Great for fresh eating, grilling, or roasting, these Italian sweet peppers are big on flavor and texture—juicy, rich, and meaty. The skin peels away easily, but it is also delicious to eat.

And Mama Mia Giallo gets going early in the season and never pauses. The plant reaches only about 24 inches high and 15 inches wide, so you can easily grow it in tall patio containers and whiskey half-barrels as well as in the vegetable patch or annual bed. It may need staking to hold up all those peppers, though.

Awarded an All-America Selection for excellence, this pepper has good foliage cover to protect the fruit from sunburn, and demonstrates great resistance to tobacco mosaic virus. It's easy to grow, never letting you down and going into smaller spaces than most other peppers. Best of all, it's great eating. You can't go wrong.

Start seeds indoors or, in climate with short growing seasons, outdoors at least one week after last frost. If starting indoors, allow 7 to 10 weeks for the seeds to mature into seedlings large enough to transplant safely. Fertilize when the blooms appear, and water well. Let the fruit ripen to a rich shade of yellow gold before harvesting it.