Rooster Peppers: A Cut Above

by Lisa Mason Ziegler | Oct 9, 2023

It was one of the earliest ASCFG conferences I attended. I was kind of a loner (hard to believe, right?) and I hadn’t connected yet with anyone so I would spend my free time observing and listening while at conferences. It is pretty amazing what you can learn just sitting in a hotel lobby with a bunch of flower farmers!

Anyhow, I also spent some of my time checking out the association tables, the vendor displays, and then… I discovered the coveted silent auction tables. At the annual conferences, there was usually a silent and a live auction to benefit the ASCFG Research Fund. This fund provides money for research specifically for the cut flower industry. Think not only of research for new flower varieties, but also for disease & pest issues/solutions, overcoming harvesting and conditioning challenges, growing practices, and so much more!

Many times growers would donate items to the auction that are otherwise not available. This created a lot of spirited and exciting auctions! I first learned of the Rooster Pepper when Cathy Jones of Perry-Winkle Farm donated the seeds to the silent suction. At first, the seeds didn’t capture my interest, but when I heard Cathy telling someone about their unique qualities as a cut flower, I knew I wanted to grow them! I won a bid to get some of the seeds and I was pretty excited about it! From that year on I began growing them as part of our fresh cut-flower offering.

Cathy says that these peppers are a cash cow crop and I am in complete agreement with her! When pinched they produce many long stems. The fruit of the pepper rises above the foliage which makes stripping off the foliage easier. I sold as many stems of fresh green peppers as I did of red ones. Any leftover stems we had we saved and sold to our customers to dry. Our commercial customers could never get enough stems for their fall wreaths and our farmers market customers really loved them too.

During our high production years, Rooster was the only pepper we grew on my farm, which enabled us to save the seed from year to year for our own use. In recent years, to preserve the qualities of this amazing little cut-flower pepper, we have contracted a grower to grow it in isolation so that we can offer the seed to others.

I reached out to Cathy when we were planning to produce and sell the seed and she kindly shared what she knew of the peppers:

“I am so pleased that you ended up with some of the Rooster peppers! I always wondered who split that bunch with Dave Dowling. We continue to grow this pepper year after year, taking care to keep it separated from all the other peppers we grow here at Perry-winkle. It is so special and such a money-maker for us in the late fall and into the holiday season. We are still popping them into wreaths and dried flower bouquets. They have quite the fan base here in Chapel Hill/Carrboro, North Carolina. We got the seed from a fellow market farmer in the 1990s, Sam said that they were an heirloom pepper that his grandmother cultivated.”

– Cathy Jones
Perry-winkle Farm

I am so grateful to those who take the steps to preserve these unique varieties for future growers! If you see Cathy at a conference, tell her thanks for helping to save Rooster!

You can find our Rooster pepper seeds here.

The Field and Garden Blog is produced by Lisa Mason Ziegler, award-winning author of Vegetables Love Flowers and Cool Flowers, owner of The Gardener’s Workshop, Flower Farming School Online, and the publisher of Farmer-Florist School Online and Florist School Online. Watch Lisa’s Story and connect with Lisa on social media!