Peppers, sweet and hot, are what's happening in the garden. I don't grow them in the quantities that I grow tomatoes or onions, or potatoes or even cucumbers, but I do have around 10 plants each year. Mostly the peppers go into tomato sauce, which I freeze.

I have most success growing thin-fleshed, light green sweet peppers. Generally small, these have tapered or blunt ends. This year I'm happy with Cubanelles and sweet banana peppers, also called yellow banana peppers or Hungarian wax sweet peppers.

Gardening books and seed catalogues don't agree on pepper classification much beyond hot, sweet, bell and sometimes pimiento. The types I've been growing are loosely classified as frying peppers or Italian frying peppers.

Next year I'm keen to try Jimmy Nardello's sweet frying peppers. According to Slow Food, which has entered Nardello peppers in the Ark of Taste (a list of heritage foods, considered endangered), Jimmy Nardello transported seeds when he emigrated from southern Italy to Connecticut in 1887. A

long, narrow pepper, it ripens red and is said to be creamy and sweet. Saturday, Nardellos will be available at Farmers@Firehouse, in the Strip District (Beth and Ken Marshall of Next Life Farm will have those as well as two other Ark peppers -- Bull Nose Large Bell and Hinkelhatz).

Peppers are ready to pick when they feel firm when gently squeezed. Use scissors to cut stems from plants, instead of twisting them off.

Incidentally, nearly all peppers when ripe will turn red. Unless they turn purple, or orange or yellow. But you can pick them green and it encourages the plant to bear fruit.

In the garden, always space hot peppers apart from sweet ones. Otherwise, they could cross-pollinate, making sweet peppers hot, or at least spicier than intended.

The hot peppers I'm growing include small Italian pepperoncini. When they turn red and feel a little dry, I'll pull the entire plant and hang it upside down in the breezy barn to dry. These I'll use for Grandma Rubin's pickles next year.

Am I thinking next year, already?

My neighbor, Frank, grows a rainbow of peppers, mostly hot ones. He cans peppers every year. His recipe is from a cookbook from St. George Serbian Orthodox Church, near the small town of Carmichaels. Hungarian Peppers, they're called.

The recipe uses equal parts olive oil, sugar (Frank prefers organic sugar), wine vinegar and ketchup. He's tweaked it, adding garlic, coriander seed and vinegar from his own wine. "Failed wine," Frank said.

I'm saving most of my peppers for the next and last batch of tomato sauce. But I always keep a few aside for this side dish.