Nicole Johnsey Burke shows how to overwinter pepper plants indoors or outdoors so they produce for years. Dig up plants two weeks before frost, repot them, then either move them inside with severe pruning or keep them in a greenhouse. Rinsing the roots when bringing them indoors prevents pests.
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Did you know your beloved pepper plants could live for years? When I first started gardening, everyone told me that peppers only grow when it's warm outside and there's no chance of frost. So every single winter, I'd pull my pepper plants from the garden and then start this slow, excruciating process again next spring. In this video, I'm going to show you two steps that you can do with your pepper plants no matter where you live, so that you can grow the same healthy, delicious pepper plants year after year without ever having to start from scratch again. I started gardening in colder climates, but then I moved to Houston, Texas, and that was where I saw the power of pepper plants. In fact, the peppers in my Houston garden, they survived for years in the garden. And that opened my eyes to the fact that peppers are a different breed of plant. So when I moved to colder climates, including Chicago, Illinois, I brought my new knowledge of the pepper plant to that town and, and realized I could do a lot more with my peppers than just grow them in the middle of the summer. So all that to say, if you live in a climate that doesn't get frost, then you don't even need to do a thing to your peppers. Your peppers will literally survive for years in the garden and you don't have to do anything to make that possible. I've gone back to clients gardens two, three years after we planted peppers, and they're still there and thriving. You can do a little prune back at the end of the season and they will come right back when it warms up in the spring and, and you'll have a nonstop supply of peppers. So don't do this. If you live in a mild climate and you don't have any frost at all, this is absolutely not necessary. But if you do have frost, then you want to do this two step process. And it starts with simply just digging around the plant, around the base of the plant and pulling it from the garden. Now, you don't want to do this too soon. You really want to look at your calendar and see when frost is coming. This is a great thing to do. Maybe two or so weeks before your first frost, if you get in a pinch like I do, you can literally do this the night before your first frost. But do not wait until frost has arrived or it's probably going to be too late. All right, Step one was simply removing your pepper from the garden. Easy peasy, right? And now we're just going to repot it. So all you need for this process is some pruners, a Shovel, a nice container, and some great organic compost mixed with some topsoil if you've got it. So we are going to have two options here. So the first option is if you have some way to grow plants outdoors through the winter under cover. So if you have a greenhouse or a cold frame or a low tunnel, if you have some kind of coverage where you can protect plants from frost and keep them nice and warm, then that's going to be option one. Me, personally, I don't have that. So I'm going with option two, which is bringing these pepper plants indoors to let them go dormant, which essentially means they're going to hibernate, they're going to not be growing. They're. They're just going to be existing in the soil over the wintertime, and then they'll come back out when things warm up at the beginning of next season. So two options here. You can either grow these undercover outdoors, or you can grow them inside. If you choose to grow them inside. Take it from me, I learned the hard way, you need to rinse the roots. Now you're going to find some gardeners that are going to say you can just up pot this, put it in a container, bring it indoors, but buyer beware. There's some stuff in here you might not want in your house. I have three teenage girls, and boy, are they mad at me every single time I bring bugs into the house. And they definitely let me know it. So in protection of my relationship with my three daughters, I am going to rinse the roots of my pepper plant. And if you've got teenagers at home, you should probably do this, too. So I'm just going to simply rinse these roots completely off, making sure I've got no bugs on the plant before I bring it in to my teenage infested home. All right, so now I'm going to give these roots a little trim. I was able to get most of the soil off, but we really don't need all this root, especially for the plant for the winter, because she's not going to be. She's not going to be making fruit for a while. So we're going to trim back these roots, make sure they fit nicely into the pot. Man, she had some nice roots, didn't she? So awesome. All right, now that we have trimmed the roots, they're ready to go back underground. Then we're going to deal with the top of the plant. So I'm using a gardenary grow bag. These things are awesome for growing outside, but also for coming inside. You could put a tray down in front of a window. I'm going to be keeping my peppers in my garage and so this is going to be perfect. I'm just going to literally have them lined up against the window wall of the garage. So I'm making sure these roots are nice and covered with soil. I'm going to put in some nice compost. Fresh, bug free, we hope. And just making sure this plant is nice and supported on all sides. And like I said, there's two options here. One is you can let this plant pretty much stay the way that it is because you're going to be growing it outdoors, under cover, in a cold frame, in a greenhouse. If you want to sponsor me greenhouse companies, I would love one. But until that day, Nicole doesn't have a greenhouse. So she is just going to bring this into her garage. And that means we've got a little bit more pruning to do. We love to keep you growing year round, not just with peppers, but all kinds of delicious things. In fact, my goal is to eat from the garden every single day of the year and I want to help you do the same. I got a free resource to show you how to make the most of your garden year round right below this video. You can check out that link. But don't do that until you subscribe to my channel. Please subscribe to the gardenary channel. When you do that, it tells the people in charge here that you want to see more of these videos. So you could also like it and maybe share it too while you're at it. So we pruned the bottom. Now it's time to prune the top. This is going to feel really sad. This is going to be hard, but we are actually going to prune this plant down, way down, and get it down pretty much to nothing. Because here's the deal, when you're asleep, you're not really doing any work, you know, like, you're not trying to make stuff, you know what I'm saying? We're not sending any emails in our sleep. We're not writing books in our sleep, we're not gardening in our sleep. And so this plant, we want to tell it, you can go to sleep, you can take a really, really long nap, a long winter's nap. And the way we tell it to do that is by literally cutting off pretty much the entire thing, cutting all the branches off and only leaving a Y, like a Y shape so that it's got the heart of the plant here. We're going to leave these major Stems, but we're cutting everything else off. Doesn't this feel. Feels sad, it feels scary, feels brutal. And you're probably going to think at this point that you're literally killing your plant. But guess what? It was going to die anyway, okay? It was gonna die anyway. My pepper plants that I leave out in the yard, they die anyway. So why not try this, right? Maybe, maybe you need to warm up. Maybe you do this, maybe you do it with one plant this year and test the theory, see if it works and, you know, see if you can let it just do its thing through the winter and then come back and maybe do more next year. So I'm just cleaning and cutting, cleaning and cutting, and I'm just going to leave this Y shape on the main branches now. A huge mistake I made when I lived in Chicago. First year I tried this. Like I said, I lived in Houston, seen the power of the pepper plant, wanted to have it in Chicago. And so I actually tried to keep the plant growing and producing in my windowsill in Chicago through the winter. And let's just say the experiment did not go well, right? So the need for the plant, the plant was feeling the need to be productive because all the leaves were still on there, the branches were still on there, Everything was still there. So the plant felt like it needed to be growing, but it was freezing cold. It was right near the window in Chicago. And so the plant died a very slow death. So instead of letting it just die quickly with frost, it died over months. So I learned, okay, you gotta choose, right? Do you want to go indoors, let it sleep, or do you want to keep it outside and let it try to produce a little bit slowly? So for me, ever since that lesson, I have decided I don't do that anymore. I just let it go to sleep, bring it indoors, don't ask anything from it. Just a total big, huge jump start on the next season. So this is it, my friend. I mean, I mean, is this impressive? Like, do you. Should I take a photo with this or what? I mean, I think everyone wants one of these for Christmas. It may not look like much now, but this is the promise of springtime peppers. Not summer peppers, springtime peppers. This means I don't have to start from a tiny pepper seed in February and pray to God that I will get a pepper by August. This means that these plants will be ready to produce leaves and fruit and flowers as early as the frost is gone next year. So are you going to try it? Got questions about how to make your peppers last for years. You got to put them in the comments. We'll do a follow up video. We'll track the progress and show you what happens. But I want to see your peppers too. So come find us on social media, on other channels and show us what you're doing with your peppers. If you're going to go for this challenge or not. Whenever you post, be sure to tag us gardenaryco. You know I will be sure to like it. Thanks so much. Love you forever. Go grow your peppers forever. It's the best thing. I'll see you next time.
