I like Ace hybrid. It produces big, four-lobe peppers great for stuffing.

Thanks for responding, ltilton and Dave. I do appreciate it and will definitely try 'Ace.'
Any others besides the one suggestion?

Lipstick. Easy to grow, super productive, delicious.

Agree with Lipstick and it is also mentioned in the other discussion I linked above. Did you note all the suggestions in that post?

Fat n' Sassy aka King Arthur
Franks
Red Delicious
Golden Treasure
etc.

Your choices will be limited if you are buying transplants. But if you grow your own from seed there are many great choices.

Dave

Ace is known for doing well in short-season, cooler climates. I'm not sure how they take the heat though.

A sweet frying pepper I love is Melrose. They are thin walled, and work GREAT when fried. I wasn't impressed until we did that.

Where do you all shop for the seeds for these varieties which we are unlikely to find in local nurseries?

For bell peppers - I tried Jupiter this year - they are making the hugest bells. And the flavor is very good. Plants are on the small size and they are brittle, so staking well, especially with huge peppers is a good idea.

I am loving Giant Marconi - they turn a gorgeous shade of red and roast wonderfully or are great sliced for salad or to fry. I did a taste test with Giant Marconi, an Anaheim, Gypsy, and a bell for roasting and peeling them, then filling with a chile relleno type mix and finishing with cheese. The #1 was Giant Marconi. #2 Anaheim. #3 Gypsy.

Gosh those were good last night!

Cindy

I'm lucky. There's a local backyard grower who sends out a plant list each, takes orders and then has pickup on one particular weekend. Vegetable plants are 60 cents each and you can get one of each variety. Keep looking around in your area. Some of these great growers don't advertise very much. This lady puts one ad in the state weekly farmers bulletin. Next spring, I would even try craigs list as a possible source for plants.

BTW every year the crows pull up the plant markers or the ink fades on them so I lose tracks of which plants are which. I was tending toward preferring thin walled banana types until I tried a recipe last year for roasted red pepper soup. It was great so I made some for the freezer.

Lipstick peppers are good I do have to agree there. I also like to grow sweet banana and cubanelle peppers, I cut them in half lengthwise and seed them, dredge them in some buttermilk than put them in a container with a mix of flour,cornmeal,salt, pepper,garlic powder and cayenne powder,shake them up real good than drop them in my deep fat fryer......they are so good (at least to me).

For ripe bell peppers, my favorite is Chocolate Bell. Thick walls, large size, great flavor, and good resistance to sun scald. Had less trouble with bugs too. Don't confuse it with Sweet Chocolate, which is a much inferior variety. Orange Bell is really great for flavor, but temperamental.

My favorite ripe sweet pepper, though, is a non-bell heirloom, Greygo. It is a 'cheese' pepper (pimento type) that is about 4" across, flattened, red when ripe, and has really thick walls. They are as sweet as apples when ripe, and that is how I eat them. Nothing special when green & not the highest yielder, but a real taste treat when ripe.

As an heirloom gardener, I don't grow many hybrids... but I can recommend Big Bertha for green peppers. Huge elongated bells up to 8" long, on vigorous plants. A grower sells them locally, so if I lose a few of my own plants, I plug a few Big Berthas into the empty spaces.

My favorite sweet pepper for eating green, oddly enough, is technically a hot pepper. Cool weather sweetens some peppers, and Pizza (from Territorial) is one of those. If harvested green just before frost, the heat (which is not even intense at its strongest) disappears. The peppers look like over-sized jalapenos 4" long X 1.5-2" wide, and are crisp, juicy, and sweet. I can't begin to describe just how good these are - truly gourmet quality. They are a treat I look forward to each Fall. The peppers have a really long storage life if refrigerated; mine keep for over a month in plastic bags stored in an unheated garage.

Pizza has a fairly long DTM, so it usually has plenty of green peppers still hanging when frost approaches. In longer season areas, though, you might want to start it later than the other peppers, to push the green stage out to your frost date. The 24-30" tall plants yield heavily.

I read your request and the answers and saw several of my favorites. Here are a few peppers I like, including one hot pepper because it is outstandingly good flavored.

Orange Bell - as zeedman says, temperamental, but I absolutely love the flavor.

Franks - A really good early dwarf red sweet pepper. Be warned that it is sensitive to drought so must be planted where you can water it.

Trinidad Seasoning - Strictly for cooking, but an excellent pepper for the purpose. Habanero type pepper but zero heat.

Chapeau de Frade - shaped like miniature bells, and I did NOT say bell pepper, I said like miniature bells, the kind you ring. They are hot but superbly flavored. You can cut off the bell part of the pepper away from the seed and it is almost a sweet pepper.

Alma Paprika - pretty good if you want a spice type pepper.

Italian Frying - the quintessential frying type pepper, very productive, matures fruit over a period of months so you can enjoy them all summer long.

DarJones

Cubanelle, Yellow Belle, and Marconi are the peppers I currently plant.

My favorite sweet peppers are the large, squat pimento types. They are beautiful, very thick flesh and very sweet. I live in the extremely hot and humid south and had TONS of them from my rather small garden. What we didn't eat fresh or give to neighbors I froze and used on pizzas and in soups and stir-fries all winter. Red ruffled pimento is very good. Seed Saver's Exchange has a couple of great ones. I've grown some of the thin-skinned ones, but for me --oven-roasting, fresh, soups etc.... I really prefer the pimento types. No disease problems and very few blemishes --they will get heavy if you fertilize, so some sort of support is good -- I used 3 sticks/poles (triangle around the plant) with string around. Most fun thing I grow. : )

Aconcagua is the best tasting pepper ever. Odessa Market is my favorite to grow.
Keep in mind these varieties are owned by Monsanto now:
Sweet Pepper: Baron, Bell Boy, Big Bertha PS, Biscayne, Blushing Beauty, Bounty, California Wonder 300, Camelot, Capistrano, Cherry Pick, Chocolate Beauty, Corno Verde, Cubanelle W, Dumpling brand of Pritavit, Early Sunsation, Flexum, Fooled You brand of Dulce, Giant Marconi, Gypsy, Jumper, Key West, King Arthur, North Star, Orange Blaze, Pimiento Elite, Red Knight, Satsuma, Socrates, Super Heavyweight, Sweet Spot

I wish more dry zone 10 or So Cal growers would weigh in on this one -- varietal success is such a climate-specific thing - .

I'm going to try a few of the following: Nardello, Jupiter, Gypsy, Chocolate Bell, Cubanelle, Red or Yellow Marconi, Yolo Wonder, Keystone Giant.

I hate sweet/bell peppers when they are green, but ripe they can be great. I prefer to eat them raw. The only way I really crave them cooked is on pizza or in cream sauces, sometimes on the grill. Any recommendations? zone 10/23.

this a post from 2013. sounds like you are going to find out with your variety mix. Here I will putting out California wonder, ace and keystone giant for sweets.

As boring as it sounds, for bell peppers I haven't found anything that out performs California Wonder for productivity. I don't really like sweet peppers so my pepper garden is generally a handful of Cal Wonders and a bunch of hot peppers.

I'm doing California Wonders as well

Jnjfarm..I say I will try a few on that list but I should also say...IF I can find any of them. I'm looking for seedlings in local nurseries and trying to sprout nardellos now. Sounds like I should grab a Cal wonder... Those seem to be around.

I lucked into a local backyard grower who offers a great list of tomatoes and peppers every year. Just found another who specializes in tomatoes. Try looking on Craigslist for plants. Some people have simple websites. Some also sell plants at farmers markets. Good luck.

Chervena Chujski, sweet red, great for roasting

Since this thread was rejuvenated I'll pipe in about changing times. Bell peppers are losing ground to the smaller minihorn peppers because of the snacking feature. And the Lunchbox series are now the most asked for sweet pepper plants for me. They are even surpasing Carmen for flavor and convenience. The Lunchbox peppers have very little ribbing and the few seeds are bunched against the stem end so you can actually eat them right off the stem like a strawberry.

Best sweet pepper for taste, abundant crops, dependability is Sweet Banana, best mild hot is Anaheim. There are very good reasons that these have been around since forever. Furthermore they are both open pollinated; so if you keep them well apart you can save your own seed and select for strains that best suit your conditions. No corporate giant is able to gobble these up.

I would just recommend try different plants and see what you prefer. Some are called "frying peppers" and for "pickling" for a reason, depends on what you want.

For bells I like "Golden Summer", very large plants that have light green peppers that are good tasting even before they ripen beautifully. "Flavorburst" is somewhat similar, with light green unripe peppers that are good also. "Big Bertha" is a very nice hybrid to red bell.

"Corno di Toro" and "Carmen" are excellent bull horn peppers, sweet peppers at their best.

"Giant Marconi" is a very nice long pepper, Burpee's "Big Daddy" is a vigorous ripen to yellow Marconi type pepper.

none. they all suck.