Overwinter pepper plants from the garden to plant the following spring

In temperate zone locations like ours where it freezes in winter, pepper plants are grown outdoors as an annual crop. That means we grow them for one season and harvest the fruit as well as the seeds. At the end of the season when frost occurs in the fall, the plants freeze and are killed off. We then start over again with new plants in the spring.

Pepper plants originally came from the tropical environment around Brazil and Bolivia. There, pepper plants grow year-round as perennial woody shrubs.

In our area, tender perennial plants such as peppers can be overwintered indoors either with a greenhouse or without.

Of course, the best winter growing conditions for tender perennials are found inside a greenhouse. By controlling temperature, water and light, the environment inside a greenhouse mimics a tropical climate. That makes it an ideal place to grow pepper plants. Years ago, when I cared for a greenhouse, I would often save assorted pepper plants from one year to the next.

Most people don’t have access to a greenhouse, but pepper plants can still be overwintered inside a home. The plants will not look as pretty as those growing in greenhouse, but they soon catch up once they are brought back outside in the spring.

In recent years, we have been overwintering one or two pepper plants just for fun. It’s fairly straightforward to do.

In the late summer, just before the first frost of the season, we select a healthy, modest-sized plant. We very carefully dig it up trying to take as many roots as possible as we gently lift it from the soil. This is an important first step since pepper plants, in general, do not like their roots being disturbed. So, take your time digging the plant.

We slip the plant’s root ball into a good-sized pot, adding extra soil if needed.

Once we bring it indoors, we keep the plant close to a sunny south-facing window. It must be right next to the glass in order to get as much direct sunlight as possible. Diffused light from 3 feet away from a window will not provide enough solar energy for the plant.

The area where we kept our plant this winter was relatively cool, around the mid-50s degrees F. The idea was to just maintain the plant, not force it to grow.

Sometimes, we prune overwintering plants to reduce the size of the tops to match the amount of roots lost during potting.

This year, we tried not pruning the plant at all. The extra foliage we left on the plant looked good for the first month or so. The leaves eventually began to go limp and by the beginning of spring had pretty much shriveled up.

In March, new leaves began to sprout from axillary buds. They quickly grew into fresh new shoots.

There were also a couple of small peppers on the plant at digging time. Normally any fruit would be picked off so the plant could use its limited energy toward recovering from the shock of transplanting. This time, we left the unripe peppers on just to see how they would do. The fruit got a little bigger, but not much though, and eventually ripened on the plant.

Since pepper plants kept under these conditions are not actively growing, we kept the plant fairly dry. We watered it occasionally, with just enough water to keep the plant from wilting. It’s easy to over-water and too much water can cause the roots to drown and end up rotting.

We applied weak fertilizer solution once or twice over winter.

Somehow, white flies found the plant, we spotted them very early on and were able to control them just by removing them by hand.

The best way to insure a successfully overwinter plant is to have it in a spot where you can look at every day. That’s how we were able to spot the insect infestation so quickly.

Several thousand years ago, people in the area we now call Mexico started growing peppers of all kinds. Once the first European explorers tasted the flavorful fruit, they brought seeds back to Europe and Asia where it spread to the rest of the world. So peppers are a relative newcomer to most of the world’s cuisine.