Hi again it's Jason from Fraser Valley Rose Farm. I'm in my rose greenhouse but today I'm
talking about peppers like this one here. Now you might wonder why you would take pepper advice from
your rose guy but the answer to that is kind of interesting roses and peppers have a lot in common
they are both perennial shrubs and the main difference between the way you would overwinter
them in the winter is their hardiness level is that roses will accept a much lower temperature
than the peppers but basically other than that the way that i cut back a rose like this
and turn it into a framework to build towards fruiting and flowering for next year is exactly
the same way that you would treat a pepper and you would get excellent results on the pepper because
peppers generally take a long time to wind up if you grow them from seed it can take 120 160 days
before it's really you're getting anything off of your pepper plant but if you were able to
overwinter it it's able to resume its growth early as soon as it comes out of dormancy and
head towards flowering and fruiting and you'll get fruit much much quicker in the season and
much more abundantly if you do it that way let me show you how here's a couple of examples of roses
that have already cut back and you can see i'll be following exactly the same template just an
wide open shrub with not a lot of foliage left on the inside to attract mold or fungus over
the winter and to just sort of stave off that rod but you'll also see here
is that there's lots and lots of places the nodes for the plant to resume the growth in the spring
so once it comes out of dormancy there's lots of spots for the buds to emerge and i'll be leaving
that on the pepper as well here you can see that this pepper branched really nicely down low and
i buried a bit deep into the pot which is just fine i'll be stripping off those lower stems
right now and i'll show you how to do that but i got a lot of productivity off of those lower stems
this year and this is a pepper called armageddon a very hot pepper coming out of britain but the
area i'll be focusing on leaving here and i'll just set up the tripod in a second and show you
the cuts that i make this center stem here is probably what i'll be leaving intact you can see
there it's got a couple of branches at the top there that i'll just trim to one or two nodes
and that will leave me a dormant shrub that can come out of dormancy early next spring and resume
growth while i make these cuts let's talk about timing temperature and light so timing wise
peppers actually begin to sulk when they get temperatures below about 55 degrees fahrenheit
so that's when i start to think about cutting these back and bringing them indoors
temperatures wise i mentioned roses are very very similar but the temperatures are quite
different when i aim to have my roses over winter and when i'm putting them dormant
i'm looking for temperatures that are more in the range of about 35 to 40 degrees fahrenheit
approaching freezing on the low end is not a problem for roses
for peppers it's a big problem so you're actually targeting a temperature much closer to about 50
degrees over the winter for your peppers now see i'm leaving some nodes here
and that'll do
now at those temperatures as i say for roses it's more like uh 35 to 40 degrees and for
peppers it's more like 50 degrees fahrenheit what you'll end up with is a plant that goes into
semi-dormancy and by semi-dormancy i mean it will not be putting on a ton of active growth and
it will actually just kind of hold in this condition or nearly so over the cold period
now i like that sort of semi-dormant both for roses and for peppers the reason i like it so
much is because pest concerns are much lower when a plant isn't trying to actively grow so some
people might think the best thing for this and for roses is to take them inside and put them under
artificial light and give them high temperatures and continue to keep them in active growth but i
find that the indoor conditions are not great for both roses and peppers in that time it's really
hard to keep both light levels air circulation and the pest levels pests tend to be a concern when i
mentioned overwintering peppers to my local pepper guy he said i've got one word for you jason aphids
and i believe him so i find that if you keep them near the lower end of their dormant range then
they'll actually stay like this more stable but they'll suffer a lot less from pests and so on
well that's an awful lot of foliage that's come off but also quite a few peppers and i'll be
pulling those off whether green or orange at this point because i'm proceeding towards some much
lower temperatures out here in the greenhouse and this i will put inside in the house let me show
you the position that i've chosen for it and then we can talk a little more about artificial light
or the need for it as plants go into dormancy here it is in my downstairs room the one that i use
during the summer for propagation most of these plants are just finishing up and so i'll be moving
them up to the greenhouse i'll be moving the tropicals upstairs and then all that will be left
down here is the peppers and some of the tender perennials that i keep that like to have the
temperatures a little bit higher the temperature in this room is just about ideal for this purpose
it bottoms out around 50 degrees fahrenheit over the winter which is a great temperature to keep
the peppers in that sort of semi-dormant stage they don't require a whole ton of extra management
i do want to talk a little bit about light because as you can see the only real source of light in
here i mean i have the the timed lights but i don't run those during the winter the only real
source of light in here is just a bright window south-facing window it just lights the room kind
of dimly during the winter that's about right for the peppers they don't need a whole ton of
light they just need a little bit so people ask me the same question about roses if i'm putting them
into sort of low temperatures three four degrees do they need some light well the answer is again
quite minimal they're not doing a lot of growing if you and in fact if you get them down into
that sort of uh very cold approaching freezing range um and it stays there pretty consistently
their light needs fall to nothing think in this case about all those rose suppliers who dig up
the roses in the fall put them in the cooler or heal them into the ground and just keep them dark
all winter in cold temperatures that's how roses are stored when they're fully dormant semi-dormant
a little bit of light this is i'm going to call in that category of semi-dormant
all right i hope that answers your questions about overwintering uh peppers and also clarify some
things about overwinting wintering semi-dormant roses if you have any questions about that
please drop those into the comments below the video i'm happy to have a discussion about it