what is going on everyone welcome to another very exciting episode here on the mi gardener channel i'm so excited for this episode because in this episode i'm going to be showing you all how to take up your pepper plants from your garden and move them indoors for the winter and the reason for doing this is because in the past i never really wanted to do this because sometimes you can bring in bugs sometimes it's a lot more it's not as necessary if you start from seed every single year and things like that the problem is is that with serrano peppers they take a long time to ripen and we've enjoyed them so much this year it's one of our all-time favorite pepper plants that we've ever grown because it's just so versatile it's sweet it's spicy it's absolutely incredible the problem is it takes so long to ripen that if we start from seed next year which we normally do with all of our pepper plants it doesn't have enough time to really get a whole lot of product production we got about two flushes of peppers and it does produce a lot of peppers the problem is is that two flushes of peppers really was not enough to sustain us we were eating them faster than the plant was producing them and so it is just now starting to put on a third flush it's really not going to just let's face it we i mean we've been pressing our luck with our first frost so it's going to come any day now and this pepper plant will be toasted if i leave it in the ground so there's just no hope of getting that third flush but what we can do is we can pull it up which we'll show you how to do and i'm going to put it in a pot and take it indoors now i'm not guarantee i'm going to get anything over the winter that's not my main goal i'm not going to really strive for uh for the plant to produce any fruit in fact generally you don't want to produce any fruit indoors because it will over stress the plant but what i will hope what i'm hoping for is to at least get it to survive so that in the springtime i can plant it out and at that time i'll have a fully mature fruiting size pepper tree if you will ready to go in the ground next year that won't have to go through that whole waiting period and we can have we can have ripe peppers by probably mid to late may which is absolutely incredible since that's usually when we're planting out our pepper plants so very exciting super cool and i'm going to show you how to do it so the first thing you're going to need is just a pot not a huge pot the biggest mistake you can make is putting your your pepper plant that you're transplanting into a large pot the more soil there is the larger chance there is of root rot when you take them indoors pepper plants do not absolutely do not like to be over water they like to stay dry so one of the things that you can do is by putting them in a smaller pot the roots will they'll take up a lot of that water whenever you do water and it won't remain in the surrounding soil leading to root rot and pepper leaf iodine some things that definitely plague peppers and we can get into later um because it seems to happen every single year anyway so i'm sure it'll happen even when we bring them in um because they're just very prone to it even with a small pot but a small pot will reduce your chances of those things happening um so a small pot is about a one and a half gallon pot and then you're just going to need some pruners we're going to do some stuff that is going to make a lot of gardeners shriek and shrill but it's essential to bringing your pepper plants indoors for the winter so let's get started alright so the first thing we want to do is we want to pull off any ripe peppers obviously harvesting the peppers that are on here is going to be the first step because we don't want to let these go to waste now do we so okay so now we harvested all the ripe peppers what we're going to do is we're going to defoliate it's going to hurt it's going to hurt but we have to do it so we're going to simply take off about i'd say i'd say about two-thirds of the of the plant here i clean up this other one too i might bring this one in later um but right now i want to get at least one in so we're going to take off about two-thirds of the plant you want to leave some you want to leave some places for new growth to come out so don't take it right down to the ground but basically that's what you want to be left with and so that is what we're going to now dig up and put into our our pot here all right so we've just gotten the plant out you can see a beautiful root system here we've we've torn some of these roots there will be some root damage that's perfectly fine pepper plants can go through some stress because what you what you're doing is you're decreasing the root system because you've decreased the top of the foliage there's always a direct correlation to how much top growth can be sustained and it's based on how many roots there are so because we took off about two-thirds of the foliage we can take off about two-thirds of the roots and it will still be fine and that's how it can survive in this small pot here and we may have to transplant later on in the season but this will allow us to at least get it started get the uh get the plant through its initial stress which it will go through some serious stress uh undoubtedly with how much it's just been you know ripped up cut up and and chopped up and stuff like that but it will survive this and then we can uh we can get this baby uh thriving again so all right let's go put it in some better soil all right so we've got our pepper plant here all planted up and ready to go indoors i wanted to run a run through a few things that we did off camera that's going to really help you out and increase your success the first thing that we did is we fertilize with trifecta you want to fertilize uh with the soil that you have in here because the the biggest thing that you can do is just throw a soilless potting mix in which generally does not have any any fertilizer or things like that in it it's just a sterile potting mix and it's a sterile growing medium and so that usually does not have any fertilizer in it there are some that that have it but generally they don't have a lot if any and so we put some trifecta plus in here so that it has a food source the biggest mistake you can have is not feeding your plant because it needs to heal and how it heals is through creating energy so another thing on that is you probably heard me say a soilless potting mix well you don't want to bring in your native soil from the garden and throw it indoors that's going to have creepy crawlies specifically fungus gnats which can wreak havoc on your plant roots and kill them because they do eat organic matter including live tissue on on plants and also it can have things like mold and mildew which can wreak havoc indoors where it can't be in check where it could be in check outdoors so go with a soilless potting mix you can get that from any big box store we use pro-mix because it's got bacteria it's got fungi a beneficial bacteria and fungi mind you and it's also have has lime to ph balance it out and it's got very porous it's got a very porous structure which allows it to hold onto just enough water but it's very well draining that doesn't hold onto too much water because that's very important when it comes to pepper plants like i said that's why you don't have a really big pot as well because all that extra moisture can lead to root rot and pepper leaf eodema so you don't want that but finally once you take off all the foliage throw it in a pot throw it in with some fertilizer and some some some sterile potting mix you're ready to go it is really that simple just make sure you keep this well watered for at least a couple days don't again you don't flood it just make sure it stays damp because it's going to use that moisture to help reduce plant stress and also make sure you take off any stress leaves you don't want any yellow leaves or diseased leaves because those are leaves that the that the pepper plant is actually going to put energy into and it doesn't have a lot of energy as it is so if you're going to have something that's going to die you might as well take it off right now and save the save the plant the energy uh to putting out new roots and new foliage the final thing that i do when i'm note is that when you put it into a window or you put underneath some grow lights limit its exposure it it seems counterproductive but it's actually going to help you out in the long run if you are sick and you're bedridden you don't go from being sick and bedridden to running a marathon in a day the next day you just don't do that it's really bad for you because it stresses you out even more you don't want to give it full growing conditions just right away because it'll just be way too stressed right now all it wants to do is just heal all it needs to do is just heal create new roots create new leaves kind of get over that stress and that can take about a week or so so limit its exposure do give it some sun don't give it just don't put it in a dark closet that'll kill it for sure but make sure it gets about four to five hours of sun and no more than that and also if it's in a really strong sunny window make sure you just take it away from that and maybe give it some some late afternoon or some some time in the sun that's not as direct um for that week or so until it heals and then once it's healing it's starting to grow and produce new foliage then you can give it your you know the full growing conditions that it deserves and you can really be off to the races so i hope you all enjoyed i hope you learned something new keeping a piper blind indoors is very rewarding and is certainly a way to get a leg up on your your fellow gardeners that probably are not doing this so if you if you did enjoy make sure to throw a like up there if you're not yet subscribed to this channel please do we have so much cool content coming out i'm really excited about it so even though the gardening season's kind of winding down here we're moving indoors pretty soon with more gardening content indoors so you all are going to love it i guarantee it and i hope you all enjoyed hopefully learn something new and as always this is luke from the mi gardener channel reminding you to grow big or go home and we'll catch y'all later see ya bye