PSA: You can grow hot peppers as perennials
PSA: You can grow hot peppers as perennials
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Hey garden peeps!
I tried overwintering some of my pepper plants this year. The process worked very well, and was easier than I'd expected, so I figured I'd share the results in case anyone else finds this useful.
Only big catch is that you'll need a space that stays around 40-60 degrees across your winter season. If you have a garage, basement, shed, root cellar that meets those requirements, you're in luck - otherwise, you're probably better off sticking to starts, or barerooting in a used wine cooler.
I used this page as my guide: https://peppergeek.com/overwintering-pepper-plants/, but to summarize, you basically uproot your plants at the end of the season, prune them down to the bottom few nodes, root wash them, and stick them in fresh, cheap potting soil with a small light to hang out for the winter.
Additional notes:
- I added crushed granite as a mulch to keep out fungus gnats.
- Watered every ~3 weeks, going off of container weight.
- Kept the light timer around 6 hrs per day.
- I pruned new growth for the first ~6 weeks, then tapered off to avoid draining all of the plants' reserves.
- I followed the standard hardening-off procedure to reintroduce the plants to the outdoors.
- This was USDA zone 8, so the short winter made this EZ mode. Maintenance was painless and the plants were showing little sign of stress, so I don't think it would've been hard to keep it up a few more months.
Where I live (Spain) it rarely freezes so you just need to prune them and you can even leave them outside.
I grow mine in containers and have made it work not even bothering with new soil until spring. Unfortunately, this year I had an early freeze sneak up on me and I'm not sure if any of them are going to make it, but we'll see shortly.
Condolences for the freeze!
Yeah, I can totally see that approach making sense for containerized plants. The fresh soil + root wash are really nice for the pest control benefits, but it seems easy enough to (e.g.) dust some diatomaceous earth on the pot occasionally to much the same effect.
I tried this a couple of years ago with a cayenne and ghost pepper plant. The ghost pepper wasn’t a great producing plant to begin with but the following year it was an absolute bust, I got one tiny stunted pepper from it.
The cayenne the first year was amazing I got so many peppers I was able to make several batches of hot sauce. After pruning it down and over wintering it wasn’t that great the following year. It produced but it was so sporadic I couldn’t get a get batch of peppers at one time for even 1 bottle of sauce. It’s better to just start with a fresh plant next year imo.
Now one thing I do want to try is getting a grow tent to keep it going year round without heavy pruning and see how that works. But that’s in my backlog atm. Currently my focus is raising carnivorous plants.
My grow zone is eastern NC so 8a and 8b
Awesome it worked for you. I need to try it again.
What variety of peppers? It doesn't freeze here, but jalapeno (my favorite) are annuals. The little bird peppers that grow on a bush just keep going forever.
The cultivars of the overwintered plants are anaheim, time bomb, and serrano. The new starts have a jalapeno, a tasmanian black, and an ancho/poblano.
Good eye on the bird peppers! I'm a huge fan of those guys too - I use them a lot in fermented salsa.