For most gardeners, pepper plants have always been treated like tomatoes: plant them in spring, harvest through summer and fall, and let the first hard frost finish them off. The following year, the process begins again with new seeds or young plants.

But peppers are not actually annual plants.

Plants in the Capsicum genus are tender perennials. In climates where freezing temperatures do not kill them, pepper plants can survive for multiple growing seasons. Even the familiar Capsicum annuum—which includes many bell peppers, jalapeños, cayennes, poblanos, and other common garden peppers—is classified as a tender perennial.

For gardeners in colder climates, that opens up another possibility. Instead of saying goodbye to a particularly productive pepper plant in October, you can bring it through the winter and give it another season.

Why We Grow a Perennial as an Annual

The problem isn’t that the pepper plant has reached the end of its natural life. The problem is winter.

Peppers developed in much warmer environments and have little tolerance for freezing temperatures. In areas with cold winters, frost effectively determines the end of their outdoor growing season. That is why generations of northern gardeners have simply treated them as annual vegetables.

Take the freezing temperatures away, however, and the situation changes.

A healthy pepper plant can develop increasingly woody stems as it matures. Instead of starting its second year as a tiny seedling, it begins with an established stem and root system. That makes overwintering especially interesting for slow-growing varieties and peppers that performed exceptionally well during the previous season.

Not every plant will survive the process, and results vary. But peppers absolutely can be carried from one growing season into another.

Choose Which Peppers Are Worth Saving

There probably isn’t much reason to bring every pepper plant in the garden indoors.

Instead, look over your plants toward the end of the season and choose your best specimens. A plant that produced exceptionally well, had great flavor, showed strong growth, or belongs to a variety that was difficult to obtain is a much better candidate than a weak or struggling plant.

This is also an opportunity to preserve a pepper that surprised you. Maybe one jalapeño was substantially hotter than the others. Perhaps a particular cayenne produced an enormous crop, or an unusual heirloom pepper became a favorite in the kitchen.

Those are the plants worth trying to keep.

Avoid overwintering plants showing significant signs of disease or serious pest problems. Bringing a pepper indoors also means potentially bringing its problems indoors.

Don’t Wait Until After the Freeze

The time to make the decision is before frost kills the plant.

Container-grown peppers make the process relatively simple because the entire plant can be moved. Garden-grown peppers require more work because they must be carefully dug and transplanted into a container.

Harvest mature peppers first. You aren’t trying to preserve the current crop as much as preserve the plant that produced it.

If digging a plant from the garden, work far enough from the main stem to retain a reasonable root system. Place it into a container with good drainage and a quality potting medium rather than simply filling the container with heavy garden soil.

Remember that you’re asking a mature outdoor plant to suddenly live in a dramatically different environment. Some leaf drop and general unhappiness during the transition shouldn’t immediately be interpreted as failure.

Inspect for Pests Before Bringing Peppers Inside

This may be the most overlooked part of overwintering peppers.

Aphids, spider mites, thrips, mealybugs and other small pests can hitchhike indoors on pepper plants. Once inside a warm house without their normal outdoor predators, a small population can become a much larger problem.

Inspect the stems, leaves and soil carefully. Remove dead vegetation and fallen leaves from around the plant. Keeping an overwintering pepper somewhat isolated from your established houseplants at first is also sensible.

This isn’t just about saving the pepper. It’s about not turning one garden experiment into an infestation of everything growing in the house.

Decide Whether You Want Growth or Dormancy

There are two different ways to approach winter.

You can attempt to keep the pepper actively growing, or you can allow it to become largely dormant and simply keep it alive until spring.

Trying to maintain active growth requires considerably more light and warmth. Peppers being kept productive indoors need warm temperatures and supplemental lighting. Flowering plants may also require manual pollination indoors.

For many home gardeners, dormancy is the easier approach.

The plant can be cut back and kept in a cooler location with greatly reduced watering. The objective isn’t to grow peppers in January. It is simply to maintain a living root system and enough healthy plant structure to restart growth when conditions improve.

Cutting Back the Plant

An overwintering pepper doesn’t need to occupy half the living room.

Many gardeners substantially prune their peppers before winter storage, removing fruit, flowers, much of the foliage and smaller branches. What remains may look surprisingly bare compared with the large bushy plant that spent summer in the garden.

Don’t confuse pruning with killing the plant. A mature pepper can have sturdy, increasingly woody stems capable of producing new growth when warmth, light and moisture return.

There isn’t one universally prescribed pruning method. Recommendations vary somewhat, including whether plants need to be heavily cut back at all. The important distinction is whether you are maintaining active growth or encouraging the plant to rest.

Winter Watering Is Different

One of the easiest ways to lose an overwintering pepper is probably to care for it too enthusiastically.

A dormant or nearly dormant plant uses considerably less water than a pepper growing outdoors during July. Constantly wet soil can damage the roots. Water should therefore be greatly reduced during the dormant period.

That doesn’t mean abandoning the plant completely. The roots are still alive and the soil shouldn’t remain bone dry indefinitely. Think maintenance rather than growth.

Fertilizer generally isn’t necessary during dormancy either. You’re not trying to push tender new growth in the middle of winter.

Where to Keep Overwintering Peppers

A cool indoor location can work well for dormant plants as long as temperatures remain safely above freezing. A basement, spare room, enclosed porch or similar protected location may work depending upon its temperature.

Plants being kept actively growing need substantially more light. A sunny window may help, but supplemental grow lighting may be necessary during short winter days.

Don’t be surprised if a supposedly dormant pepper decides to produce a few leaves. Plants don’t always follow our schedules perfectly. The real measure of success is whether the stems and roots remain alive until conditions improve.

Wake Them Up Before Spring Planting

The advantage of overwintering becomes apparent as the next growing season approaches.

Rather than beginning with a seed, you already have a mature plant.

Several weeks before peppers would normally return to the garden, move dormant plants into warmer conditions and gradually increase light and watering. New shoots should begin appearing from the existing stems as the plant wakes up.

Once active growth resumes, normal feeding can gradually begin again.

Don’t immediately put a pepper that has spent months indoors into full outdoor sun. Just like seedlings started indoors, overwintered plants need to be hardened off. Gradually expose them to outdoor conditions over a period of days before leaving them outside permanently.

And don’t let an unusually warm spring afternoon fool you. Peppers remain extremely sensitive to cold. Wait until frost danger has passed before returning them to the garden permanently.

Plan for Overwintering When You Plant Next Spring

Once you’ve successfully kept a pepper for more than one season, you may want to change how you grow certain varieties.

A favorite pepper can be planted directly into a large container in spring rather than transplanted from the garden every autumn. When cold weather approaches, the entire container can simply be moved indoors.

You can also start paying attention to individual plants rather than thinking only in terms of varieties. If you grow six jalapeños and one plant clearly outperforms the other five, mark it during summer. That’s the plant you may want to preserve.

Overwintering also gives gardeners another reason to keep notes. Record which varieties survived winter well, which struggled, how severely you pruned them, where you stored them and approximately how often they needed water. After several seasons, you’ll have an overwintering method adapted to your particular house and growing conditions.

Before You Pull Those Peppers This Fall

The end of the vegetable garden doesn’t necessarily have to mean the end of your pepper plants.

That big jalapeño covered with fruit, the cayenne that produced more peppers than you knew what to do with, or the unusual variety you spent months growing from seed may still have another season—or several—left in it.

Peppers aren’t pretending to be annuals. We grow them as annuals because our winters force us to.

Bring the right plant out of the cold, and next spring you may not have to start over at all.