Give your pepper plants new life – and a new growing season – by overwintering them to fruit again next year! Here’s how…

It’s time to get your fall garden in order, and that means cleaning things up, mulching empty beds, and preparing your pepper plants for winter.

What??

Yes, that’s right, peppers are perennials! If you’re as surprised as I was to discover that, you’ll definitely want to watch the video below.

In fact, with the right conditions and care, you can over-winter your pepper plants to produce again next summer – and even the summer after that.

Peppers can be a challenge to grow – especially in cooler climates. Even if you give them a head start by purchasing nursery plants in the spring, or starting them indoors well before warm weather arrives, it can take them several months to get ramped up and really start producing. This means, if you don’t have a long summer growing season, you may not get a lot of peppers off your plants before frost arrives in the fall. By overwintering your peppers, you can have sturdy, established plants that are ready to start producing as soon as the heat of summer hits.

I have never tried this method (to be honest, I had never heard of such a thing before watching this video), but I would definitely give it a shot! Here in Ohio, we often don’t get peppers until mid-August – or sometimes later (this year they were early for some reason), so it would be nice to give them a longer growing season.

This video shares lots of very helpful tips for overwintering pepper plants – no matter what climate you’re in. Here are a few things you’ll learn:

• How to transplant your pepper plants to prepare them for the winter
• What to feed them to keep them healthy while they are semi-dormant
• What type of light your plants need
• How to prune your plants for overwintering
• And more!

Check it out now, and let us know how it goes if you decide to give it a shot!