I Overwintered Pepper Plants For 5 YEARS…And THIS Happened!

Did you know pepper plants are NOT annuals? Peppers are perennials, and we can easily grow the same pepper plant year after year. All we have to do is overwinter a pepper plant to protect it from cold, and it will keep producing. In this video, I show you how to overwinter pepper plants for nonstop harvests. Plus, I ran the ultimate test: I overwintered pepper plants for 5 years…and this happened!

How To Dig, Fertilize and Prune Peppers For Overwintering: https://youtu.be/c-fvoxZauFI?si=Z-zB9GiUXP37cl9m

Pepper seeds for pepper varieties well suited for overwintering can be purchased** here:
Cherry Hot: https://amzn.to/3IC18cz
Cherry Sweet: https://amzn.to/4pHhmSj
Jalapeño: https://amzn.to/3Ilhx57
Serrano: https://amzn.to/42T6ua7
Sweet Banana: https://amzn.to/4pJH2xH
Blazing Banana (Hot): https://amzn.to/4mCtP78
Pepperoncini: https://amzn.to/4nnyGKu

I use the following products* to grow peppers in my garden:
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5 Gallon Grow Bags, Black: https://amzn.to/48lAO0X
5 Gallon Grow Bags, Tan: https://amzn.to/46Yjy0o
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Alaska Fish Fertilizer [5-1-1] (Gallon): https://amzn.to/4d9c1x7
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Black Insect Netting (30% Shade): https://amzn.to/3KosL9t
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
0:00 Surprising Pepper Plant Facts
1:33 Overwintering Peppers Procedure
3:03 My 2 Year Old Pepper Plants
6:01 My 5 Year Old Pepper Plant
8:39 How Long Can Pepper Plants Live?
9:30 Best Pepper Varieties To Overwinter
11:33 Pruning Pepper Plants For Overwintering
14:33 Pepper Pruning Demonstration
17:11 Where To Overwinter Peppers
19:10 Adventures With Dale

If you have any questions about how to overwinter peppers and growing peppers in containers, want to learn more about growing fruit trees or the things I grow in my raised bed vegetable garden and edible landscaping food forest, are looking for more gardening tips and tricks and garden hacks, have questions about vegetable gardening and organic gardening in general, or want to share some DIY and “how to” garden tips and gardening hacks of your own, please ask in the Comments below!

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ABOUT MY GARDEN
Location: Southeastern NC, Brunswick County (Wilmington area)
34.1°N Latitude
Zone 8B

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What’s going on, gardeners? On today’s video, I’m going to answer a question that so many of you have asked. What happens when you overwinter a pepper plant for a very long time? On this video, I’m going to show you a pepper plant that I have been growing for over 5 years. The results are absolutely incredible, and I’m going to show you how anybody can accomplish this. If you’re new to the channel, please subscribe, hit the bell for notifications, and check out my Amazon store and Spreadshop links in the video description for everything I use in my garden. and awesome custom apparel and gear. It often surprises people to learn that peppers are not annuals. They are in fact perennials. In their native subtropical climate, they can grow for many, many years, getting to be very large and woodlike, almost like a very large shrub. It just happens to be that here in the United States, where most of us live, we have truncated and narrow growing seasons with a lot of frost and freeze in the winter. So, we are forced to grow them as annuals. But if you even live in the United States in a place with a subtropical frostfree climate like deep into South Florida, you can grow the same pepper plant in ground for many, many years and it’ll get pretty large. 5 years ago, I decided I was going to push the envelope of growing peppers and see just how long one single pepper plant could survive. I’ve always wanted to know the answer to that question. And so fascinating and successful has it been that I have decided to triple down. and I am now overwintering three different pepper plants. They are multiple years old and I can’t wait to show you the process of how I’ve achieved this. First, you must dig up a pepper plant and transfer it into a container. You’ll want to do this well before your first frost to ensure your pepper plants are not stressed from cold. Select a healthy pepper plant showing minimal damage from insects or diseases. Do not choose plants showing significant pest damage or leaf disease. Once you select your plant, dig up as much of the root ball as possible using a shovel or tel. Take care to preserve the roots. Transfer your pepper plant into a 3 or 5gallon container using a good quality potting mix. I’m going to use this basic potting mix from a big box store for ease and convenience. Place enough mix in the container so when you place the root ball into the pot, it leaves a 2 to 3 in gap at the top of the container. Add an organic fertilizer and bone meal to the container. Place the root ball on top. Add a little more fertilizer and bone meal. Then fill in the edges with potting mix. Top dress with 2 in of a natural mulch. I’m using cedar mulch, but any natural mulch will do. Then water the plant well to compact the soil. I recommend adding a water soluble fertilizer to your watering can. I’m using a blend of Alaska Fish Fertilizer and Jax 2020 2020. The water-soluble fertilizers will help the plant recover from transplant shock. Move your plant to a full shade location for a few days to help it recover. Too much indirect sun can stress it out in its vulnerable state. Both pepper plants that you see in front of you are exactly 2 years old. The pepper plant on the left is a sweeter spice pepper known as a Trinidad pimento pepper. The pepper on the right is a standard jalapeno pepper plant that pretty much everybody is familiar with. Both of these pepper plants are very productive and very healthy, but they have taught me a valuable lesson when it comes to pepper plant adaptability. This plant right here is the jalapeno. We are all familiar with jalapenos. They have been bred for many generations and as such they have become widely adaptable. They tolerate all sorts of different climates because of how long they’ve been bred and how much they’ve been exposed to. And this pepper plant, well, this just loves the temperature of the winter. As long as I don’t let it get exposed to frost and freeze, it does just great. And even though we have the short days and the weak sun of the winter, you can see this pepper plant is absolutely loaded with fruit. Look at all of the jalapenos on that. It’s getting nothing more than very weak winter sun on my uh inside my sun room through the plastic windows of the sun room. Look at it. It’s just doing fantastic. I pick peppers off of this to eat every single week and it’s just it’s blowing me away with how productive it is. Super healthy. The other thing you’ll notice is that the stalk has mostly lost its green. It is turning almost like a wood color. Peppers aren’t actually made of wood, but for all intents and purposes, this is becoming a very hard material similar to wood. It’s losing all of that greening, and probably in another year, there won’t be any green left on that stem. But just look at that incredible production. Is that just awesome? Two years later, it’s still as healthy and vibrant as ever. This Trinidad Pimento pepper, on the other hand, is a Caribbean pepper. Not a lot of people in the United States know about it. It is not very widely adapted and it is a much more tropical plant and as such, it really doesn’t like the cooler temperatures. This takes twice the amount of time to germinate as the jalapeno pepper. It’s a very slow germinator and it really is used to the warm weather of the Caribbean. It’s a Caribbean pepper, so it’s not liking the winter as much. It’s it’s still flowering. It’s still producing fruit, but you can see it is just not as adapted to the climate as that jalapeno is. And as a result, it doesn’t have a big crop on it. Now, it’s doing just fine. It’s healthy. It is going to sail through the winter, but it’s probably going to take until it gets really warm here in May and June for it to once again explode with lots of flowers and blooms. You’ll see it’s starting to put on new growth here and a couple of new flowers, but it really doesn’t like the cooler temperatures. It’s not as widely adaptable as that insane jalapeno that is just loaded with fruit. Now, as cool as those two pepper plants I just showed you are, the one that I’m most proud of is the one on the right. This is my five-year-old pepper plant, this is nothing more than your typical garden variety hot cherry pepper that you can pick up at pretty much any garden center. This was the first pepper plant that I ever dug out of ground and I started overwintering it. In fact, in that video that I linked down in the video description, this is the very plant that I dug up in October of 2020. Now, in order to dig this up in October of 2020, that means I started this plant from seed the first week of February 2020 because that’s when I start my pepper seeds, the first week of Feb, last week of January. So, this is officially five full years old. And I can’t wait to show you this plant because something has happened to it that is just utterly incredible. The first thing I must show you is the trunk of this 5-year-old pepper plant. This has almost transcended wood. This has turned into what looks like the gnarled up trunk of a 100year-old oak or tulip tree. It’s just fascinating how it is taken on this almost ancient look. And as you go up on the plant, it only looks more and more gnarled. It’s really crazy looking. Then you’ll finally get to the top. You’ll see where the new green growth on the plant is. And what do you see? Absolutely incredible cherry pepper production. And again, I pick a dozen, half a dozen to a dozen cherry peppers off of this every single week. I just love eating them with lunch. They are one of my favorite peppers. And again, I think the key to success here is that it is a widely adaptable variety. Cherry peppers have been bred for generations, so they’re tolerant of just about any climate as long as you make sure that they do not get exposed to frost and freezing temperature. But just look at the yields on this thing. You saw the red peppers on top. Well, they are still producing new green peppers. This thing just got done a flowering phase, and I think it has too many peppers on it for it to flower again. If I were to actually start picking off all of these peppers, it would probably send it into yet another flowering cycle. So absolutely stunning how many peppers are still on this 5-year-old pepper plant. Did you ever think that a 5-year-old pepper plant could be this productive? Because I thought it would live this long. I didn’t think it would be just as productive as a brand new plant, if not more productive. It’s just absolutely fascinating. Just stunning. So, to all the people out there that have asked me over the years, how long can a pepper plant live? I still don’t have an accurate answer to that question. We know that it’s at least 5 years. In fact, 5 years is a cakewalk. After 5 years, the pepper is still as productive as it is its very first year, if not more productive. So, we know that five years absolute joke. No problem. I would think with proper maintenance and care, 10 years should be easily doable, if not longer. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if there could be pepper plants out there that are well taken care of that are living well into the 10 to 20 year mark. I mean, I’m not seeing any of these slow down. Are you? We have 2 years, 2 years, and 5 years, and every single one of them looks, if not just as good as the day that I pulled them out of ground in October. They may look even better. Another question I get all the time is, “What are the easiest varieties of peppers to overwinter if your goal is to have a harvest all winter long?” And I think that is a very straightforward question that has a simple answer based on my experience. And that is going to be your widely adapted smaller fruited peppers that are not very spicy. Now, you need to factor in that during the winter months, the sun is a lot weaker and the days are a lot shorter. So you’re having less solar radiation coming in. You’re also having cooler temperatures. So because of that, your larger fruited peppers, they’re not going to do as well. Something like a bell pepper or like your Jimmy Nardellos or any of your other larger stuffing peppers like a pablano or something like that, they require a lot more sun energy and warmer temperatures to make the plant food and have the metabolic rate to produce those very large fruits. You want to stick with something with smaller fruits. Also, you don’t want to grow any super hot peppers like your habaneros, your scorpion peppers, your Carolina Reapers, your ghost peppers. They are not going to do well with the short days and with cooler temperatures. They like 90 plus degree temperatures outside with really long days. So, that’s just not going to cut it. your very widely adaptable peppers that aren’t super spicy like a jalapeno or a serrano or a cherry pepper or your smaller sweet peppers like a lipstick pepper or something else that’s going to be in the 3 to 4 in range maybe like a pepperonchini. They’re all going to do a lot better for you indoors because the smaller fruits are going to require less solar energy to form. So that’s why I’m able to overwinter these jalapenos and cherry peppers and have a good harvest. Whereas this more tropical pepper, it’s not really doing a great job forming fruits. The fruits that they are forming are kind of smaller and deformed. It’s going to take this more tropical type pepper, the warmer temperatures in the summer to kind of catch back up and recover. Another question you may have is how do I prune my peppers that I am overwintering? Well, I think this is going to be a two-part question and answer. The first part is going to be if you want to actually harvest your peppers for fruit throughout the winter. That is what I do. And because of that, I actually prune my pepper plants on the opposite schedule that you may think. The purpose of these pepper plants are to have a crop on them and to be flowering and producing fruit going into the winter so I can eat off of them when nothing else is growing in my garden. So for that reason, I prune these plants in early summer when the rest of my garden is actively producing peppers because at that point in the year, I don’t need these pepper plants because my garden is producing all the peppers that I need. So while I’m eating out of my garden, say in late June, early July, that is when I’m going to prune these peppers in containers for the next overwintering cycle because they’ll go through a period of shock where they will sit still and not do much for a couple weeks. then they will slowly put on new growth and reproduce a canopy. So, they’re going to take two to three months to recover and flower and fruit again. So, realistically speaking, if I prune these on July 1st, they’re probably not going to be setting fruit for me again until at some point in September. And that is perfect. That means that they will be fresh and rejuvenated and have some fruit on them going into the fall and I will be able to carry that into the winter. That is a very important strategy that you must have. Now, part two of that question is going to be if you live in a much colder climate or you’re at a much higher latitude where you don’t get strong enough sun, you don’t have a sunny window that you can overwinter these pepper plants in. In that case, you’re probably only going to overwinter a pepper plant so you can get a jump start on the growing season. If that is in fact the case, what you’re probably going to want to do is cut back your pepper plants pretty significantly in the fall. Don’t obviously let them get hit by any kind of frost. But the goal would be to cut them back probably 60 or 70% of the way to kind of like a chalice form very very low and then stick them in front of a low light window where they can at least get some amount of sunlight to just kind of make their way and stay alive throughout the winter. And the goal of these plants in that case would be to just get you a big jump start on the growing season because they will probably have growth and be maybe starting to flower for you in April whereas maybe you haven’t even put your transplants out into your garden yet. But that being said, even if you live in a very high latitude or you don’t have a sunny window, you can take my approach of eating off of these all throughout the year by just getting yourself like a $30 grow light that you could put over the plant. So, it’s still totally possible even if you live in a northern climate uh or you don’t have a sunny window, just get yourself a grow light. I’ll place a link in the video description for something that can help you get through the winter. If you do want to harvest off of your peppers all year long, if you dug up this pepper plant at the end of the year and you plan on giving it a very sunny window or a supplemental grow light and you want to get it to fruit for you in the winter, it is important that we do minimal pruning to this plant because, as you can see, it is just starting to flower and produce fruit. So, if we cut it back in significance, the plant is not going to produce any fruit because it’s going to grow too slowly throughout the off season to recover. So in that case, all we want to do is prune for the 3D Ds: dead, diseased, and dying. So we want to remove any growth that fits that characteristic. So we have a little bit of not so great looking leaves here that got a little beat up. So we’ll prune off all of these little bit of beat up insect damaged leaves. So again, dead, diseased, and dying growth. We will remove that. But aside from that, we don’t want to do anything else to this plant if the goal is to get fruit in the offseason. But eventually, you will need to cut back and rejuvenation prune your pepper plants. Now, I prune my overwintered pepper plants in the summer when my main crop in the garden is producing. So that way, my pepper plants have time to recover and time to put on a new crop for the fall and overwinter them all over again. But if you decide that you want to cut them back and just stick them in front of a low light window sill and you don’t want them to fruit over the winter, you just want to get a jump start on the new growing season, you’ll still have to do the same methodology. So in addition to pruning off the 3Ds, the dead, diseased, and dying branches, you will also need to prune it for balance and symmetry. So if you have yourself a short pepper plant like here, you can simply prune off some of the branches on top and what will happen is these branches will sprout new green growth and that will give you a new chalice like form. Alternatively, if you want to have yourself a smaller pepper plant, you can cut the pepper back to some suckers. So here I have some suckers that are growing along this stem. If you wish, you can cut right above the healthiest looking sucker, remove this sucker off to the side, and then these suckers right here will branch out and become the new pepper plant. So, that is another way that you can rejuvenation prune your peppers for another growing season. Just make sure if you cut it this severely, you have yourself some nice green growth that’s already starting to shoot out. And remember to move your plant into the shade so it can recover. If you leave it out in the sun after you pruned it this heavily, it will likely go into decline. As a point of reference, this is where I put my pepper plants during the winter to get them through. They sit out on my sun room, as well as my bananas, my plumeriia, some of my more sensitive potted citrus. I have some tomato transplants down there. This is basically a witness protection program for plants from Christmas to Valentine’s Day because it’s just too cold here and everything has to sit and wait. But you can see that the sun room right now, it gets about 5 to 6 hours of direct sunlight. You’ll see the sun is passing by right now. So, these plants are just about getting every drop that they can throughout the day. Like I said, it’s about 5 to 6 hours of direct sunlight. If you have a room like this in your house, overwintering pepper plants and getting them to fruit is going to be a piece of cake. But again, if you don’t and all you have are some modestly sunny windows, you can just get yourself a little supplemental grow light that’ll give them a little bit more light to help them power through and get them to bloom. That should be all you need as long as you’re growing the proper varieties that are widely adaptable and have small fruits. And that right there is how I have been overwintering numerous pepper plants for many years and how I was so successful doing it. So everybody, I sure hope you found this video helpful. If you did, please make sure to hit that like button, subscribe to the channel, and please ring that notification bell so you’re notified when I release more videos like these. If you have any questions about overwintering pepper plants or other plants, please drop them down in the comments below. I will do my best to address them. If you’re curious about anything I use in real life to overwinter my plants or that I use in my garden in general, I placed links to all of the things down in the video description. So, expand the video description. you’ll see direct links to all of my favorite things and for everything else I use in real life. It’s linked in my Amazon storefront in the video description. And while you’re down there, please check out my spreadshop for custom merch if you want to support the channel. Thank you all so much for watching and I hope to see all of you again on the next video. Dale, holy smokes, buddy. Do you see what I see? Look at this across the pond. It’s hard to see, but that is a gator sunning right there. That’s a big gator right there. I haven’t seen them for a while, but now that it’s cooling off again, buddy, they’re starting to come outside again. Do you want to go say hi to the gator on the far side of the pond? I don’t think we’re going to walk around the pond today. Not with Wally Gator out there. That’s okay. Dale has plenty of sniffs here. He’d rather spend the time in the grass.