Over Wintering Plants
Peppers and Tomatoes are actually perennial
- Annual - Lives for less than a single year or cycle, flowering and then dying. Some of these plants may seem to come back every year, but they are normally just the ones that are very good at coming back from seed.
- Biennial - Germinate and grow in year one and then flower and die in year two.
- Perennial - Grows and flowers over a number of years.
While we are at it, meet Donald, our Orange F1 Spice pepper plant, he's the first one I think I've successfully over wintered...
All of my peppers were kept in 30cm pots, so it wasn't much of a chore to bring them in.
I'm not sure I'd think it was worth digging them up and potting, it looks like a bit too much work for my liking.
Benefits of over wintering
- Benefits
- Better root system
- Bigger main stem
- Faster growth in spring
- Longer harvest period
- Drawbacks (learned the hard way!)
- Pests/Disease spread if indoors
- Can be low success rate
- High Effort pruning/digging out if planted in ground
Lack of space!
Before the peppers came in, I did attempt to bring in some tomatoes that had popped up as seedlings in August as a bit of an experiment.
All of the plants kept growing right up to Christmas and did produce a small batch, but I think I made the mistake of not cutting them back afterwards, and they then suffered from lack of light.
Two pepper plants also succumbed to damage from mites, keep an eye out for this and give the plants a good clean before you bring them in, I also removed any mulch from the soil surface later than I should have, it was a great hiding place for insects, and kept too much moisture in the soil.
Christmas
By Christmas, Donald was still fruiting, at this point I think I should have taken off the remaining peppers, given him a prune and let him go dormant.
It was around then that I had found the mite damage where I hadn't been paying attention, and had to get rid of two of the other pepper plants, and cut the losses with the rest of the tomatoes to make it easier to get rid of the pests.
I had a number of seeds and had bought some of the items in the blog post.
Having the plants inside did give me a steep learning curve on spotting bugs though, so one year of that will leave me better prepared, caterpillars, spider mites and black flies we interesting to get rid of.
Feb 2026
By February, Donald was looking a bit ragged and lonely, but he had produced a couple of smaller chillies which were still usable.
I'll be running an experiment next year with near identical plants if I can, one pruned and one not to see what difference it makes, and try to keep a few, but with the rate at which the early propagation has gone, I'm still 50/50 on what to do in future, I'm guessing spring and hardening off will help me make my mind up...
There are now some green shoots at the base of the plant, and if none appear at the ends of the main branches, I may give him a small prune to above the first nodes.
