I saw it with my own eyes. At the Farmers’ Market in Exeter on Thursday, Benjamin Cole of Shaw’s Hill Farm in Kensington was peddling green peppers. Except that some of his green peppers were purple.
Most bell peppers start out green and ripen to a brilliant shade of red, yellow, orange, purple, or even chocolatey brown. There are a few varieties, however, that start out colored and then ripen to another color. The Islander is one such pepper. It starts out purple (with some light green mottling in the early stages), then ripens to a dark reddish-orange. Cole says that it will not likely be available in the mature reddish-orange stage because, like most bell peppers, it is more likely to rot on the vine once it has achieved maturity (that’s one of the reasons mature colored peppers are so much more expensive than immature peppers). Not only are mature peppers more prone to rotting prior to being picked, but they have a shorter shelf life after they’re picked as well.

As far as flavor, purple green peppers taste pretty much like green green peppers, but with an added visual appeal when raw (they do lose some of their color upon cooking). The Islanders worked beautifully julienned in a pickled salad with super-sweet Walla Walla onions (which Cole says he eats like apples) and pickling cukes. In addition to the Islanders, Shaw’s Hill grows three other varieties of green bell pepper, two that will ripen to orange and one that will ripen to yellow. They also offer four varieties of hot peppers (still a couple of weeks away): jalapenos, habaneros, serrano del sol and ancho.

Speaking of pickling cukes, they’re not just for pickles. Sweet, juicy and with a slightly thicker skin than a slicing cucumber, they are perfect sliced into a garden salad or cut into sticks for dipping—in fact, they actually work better than a slicing cucumber for the latter purpose because they have smaller seeds and tend not to fall apart when sliced lengthwise the way some cucumbers do.