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.
That sounds heavenly! Do you have any favorite cultivars that do well like growing like that?
Do you get frost where you are?
In Spain? Lol. Only in northern parts if you’re lucky. Climate in Spain is either nice summer or extremely hot summer.
Frost limits what plants you can grow more than maybe any other factor, so I dream of such things. My area is so close, our winter lows usually only drop to the high 20s but there are so many tropical plants we still can’t grow.
And we’re just as or maybe hotter and drier than Spain too. It’s a harsh climate but we have good soil and with irrigation many things are still possible.
In which world the high 20s is freezing? It’s summer temperature! The water freezes at 0.
The US lol. Not sure if this is satire but in case you don’t know high 20s F is like -2 or -3C.
We just need a little more climate change and I can really go crazy with mangos and bananas and all those.
Yeah, I don’t know what 20F is. Just like most humans in this world. And we’re talking about Spain here…
I was not talking about Spain though. I was talking about the US where we use Fahrenheit.
Now you know how things work in the US if you somehow avoided this your whole life.