(gentle music) - Welcome back to "Jacques in the Garden". Today, we're gonna talk about why these pepper plants look
so funny, but in reality, what we're actually gonna
talk about is over wintering and specifically over wintering
peppers and eggplants, which are in the garden back there. Now you might think it's kind
of funny for me to mention over wintering when I'm
in zone 10b San Diego, where we might get a hairline of a frost. But what over wintering
really means is taking a plant that's usually grown as an annual, perfect example is a pepper,
and having it survive through the off season, usually winter. So then the following
spring, when you are ready to actually get that
pepper plant going again, you have a much more robust plant rather than just the seedling. So this can be done for
a few different plants. The main ones that
usually are talked about are peppers and eggplants. So the reason why peppers
and eggplants are the ones that are usually talked about
for over wintering the most is because these are both plants that really like having
a warm growing season. So when you have the beginning of spring and things are still cool and slow, your plant is just barely growing and you're really losing
those first two, three months to just getting the plant
to establish itself. So by over wintering these
guys, you're basically skipping that first two to three month cycle. And for me, for example, last
year, or actually this year, I had a eggplant at
the beginning of spring rather than in summer. So there's a huge time advantage you get from over wintering. It's really not that hard. Today, we're gonna talk
about how to take peppers straight up out of the
ground, put 'em in a pot and prep 'em from over wintering. We're also gonna talk
about how to over winter a pepper in the ground if you're in a warmer climate, like I am, and lastly, we're gonna touch on eggplant and over wintering eggplant in the ground and why you're not actually
losing anything by doing it. So if that looks and sounds
interesting to you guys, stay tuned, let's get into it. All right so, like I said,
we're gonna go ahead and prune and then dig this out
and put in the smart pot and the reason why is cuz
I'm gonna over winter it. So I figure out while I'm doing it, I might as well show you guys my approach, but I'm gonna bring in
the camera a lot tighter so you could actually see what I'm doing. All right so we're up close and personal with this prik kee noo pepper here. This is a red prik kee noo,
you can see this pepper here. So what I'm gonna do is... There is some food on here. Unfortunately, I'm going to just scrap it. It's not gonna be that
much in the long run. So I'm gonna go ahead
and start shaping this. And what I'm going for here is
that, when this over winters, the idea is that you want it to grow back into a nice shape later. So first thing we're gonna do is clear off anything on the outside,
and then I'm gonna drop it and then I'm gonna clear
off any clutter inside. So I'm gonna just start cutting. I might jump in and talk a little bit, but for the most part, I just
wanted to do a demonstration. So I'm also gonna come in and clean out anything that looks like this. This is like some sort of disease issue where the pepper is dying off. So anything that looks like that, I'm gonna go ahead and cut off as well. All right so what you could see now is that the pepper was originally all the way out here and up to here and I've now dropped
it down significantly. I've cut off any of
the parts of the pepper that have new leaves or anything that's like new pepper flowers, 'cause I don't want the
plant focusing on that while I'm trying to focus it on surviving. So a lot of people will actually cut off all foliage when they pot 'em up, but it's still fairly early in the season and this plant will continue to grow some so I'm gonna leave it
at this stage, pot it up and it might still grow
a little bit more by, you know, November. And at that point I'll come
back and prune it again. But at this point, we're
good to just dig this out. So I'm gonna go ahead
and do that right now. Okay. So I'm gonna come in on the outer edge of that plant's dripline, I'm gonna make a few cuts with a trowel. The idea here is that I wanna cut off as many of those little
feeder roots so that, when I'm pulling it outta the ground, I'm not gonna be messing it up
and tearing off other parts. So this doesn't have to be perfect. This isn't actually
even entirely necessary, but I find that I tend to do
better if I do this first. Okay so accidentally
damaged that branch there so I'm gonna go ahead and snip it off. So now I've cut all the way around it. Then I'm gonna come at at an angle and try to pop the plant out while giving it a little
encouragement here. Boop. All right. So there you have it. Actually, you have quite
a lot of roots preserved. Oh wow. So looking here... So I just took a sniff because that's like a mycorrhizal network so that has a slight mushroom smell to it. So it is actually quite nice,
but in the end, all this dirt, or soil I should say, is
actually pretty clay-ey. So if I put this in a pot, chances are it's gonna just stagnate. So I wanna clean it up somewhat. So unfortunately I will lose some of that mycorrhysal but that's okay. Some of will stay behind
and it will continue. So I feel pretty good
about that right there. I got most of that extra
soil off that I don't need and I have a pretty good
amount of roots actually. So I'm gonna go ahead, take this and transplant it into a pot. So if you're seeing this, you'll see that there was
actually a change of plans. As I was knocking some of the
soil off and moving it over, I actually noticed a couple grubs inside. What they like to do is get right into the bottom of the root ball
and actually eat your roots. So what I ended up doing is
knocking all the soil loose to make sure I didn't have any grubs left. Some people could say that, you know, you might wanna rinse this to make sure there isn't anything else, but I feel pretty good about it at this stage. So what I'm gonna do actually, instead, since this is actually
a quite small plant, instead of going with the
five gallon smart pot, I'm gonna go for this
repurposed one gallon pot. So what I've done is I've created a little soil level
down there with a hill. I'm gonna take these roots and kind of try to spread
'em out a little bit so that they're sitting around that hill. Then I'm gonna take some
soil and throw it on top. But as I'm doing this, I'm gonna shake the pot
a little bit like this. The idea is that's going to work all that soil in between the roots, because what you really don't want is little air pockets
inside your root ball. So I'm gonna do this a couple times. Afterwards, all you have
to do is just water it. And just basically the
most important thing about over wintering
peppers is making sure you don't water too much because there's not gonna be growing much. So if you keep watering it, eventually the water's gonna build up, yhe plant's gonna go
stagnant from lack of oxygen, due to all the water, and it'll die. So that's the most common way of losing an over wintered pepper is
not managing your watering. And, in this case, it's actually on the level of overwatering it. (gentle music) Okay. There you go. So it's been about three days now from the time that I dug this up, this is that same pepper
that I showed you guys how I pruned, trimmed it
down, dug it outta the ground, totally removed the soil and repotted it. So three days on, it's still looking good. Originally I had about six
or eight leaves on here and I left those on there on purpose, usually remove most of the foliage, or some people like to remove all of it, but I like to leave a couple
leaves on as an indicator. For instance, if you
look at this right here, these are two other ones
that I over wintered in much smaller pots, the leaves are very upright. They don't look like they're droopy, like they have some sort of water stress. And originally when I dug this out, it did appear all the droopy
and that's what I expected. If you think about it, I just removed all the
soil from its roots, it had no access to water
for some period of time. But what I noticed is after a day, all those leaves perked right back up and that's exactly what I wanted to see. When I saw that all the
leaves actually had perked up, that was a great sign to me
because it meant that the roots that I just ripped outta the
ground and put into new soil, did find contact and were able to actually transport water up into the leaves. So that's a great sign that
basically this is alive. I think it will make it for certainty. Eventually those leaves did drop. That's not surprising,
it's pretty expected, they were very stressed
for a few days there. But the fact that they did
perk back up is a great sign that the plant's gonna make it. While I'm talking about
the watering issue, I'll say that the hardest thing
about over wintering peppers really is managing your water. It's really easy to overwater
your wintered peppers. And the reason why is because
you see a pot like this, you think, okay, this needs a
significant amount of water, but in reality, this
plant's not supporting any sort of foliage, it's
not growing anything. So it's pretty much just the stem and maybe a couple tiny leaves. So think about how much
water that would take, it's negligible. So really the most important
thing that I could say is that, when you're over wintering a pepper, do try to be mindful of
how much water it gets. If it's raining, you
don't wanna leave this set out in the rain because it'll just entirely get saturated. And the reason why, I guess
I should say, that's bad is that when something gets
entirely saturated with water and there's nowhere for oxygen
to penetrate into the soil, and roots do need some amount
of oxygen in order to survive. When you see white roots on a
plant, that's usually a sign that they're getting plenty
of oxygen and they're healthy. If you dig it out and you see that all the roots are brown or black, there's a good chance that that plant had sat in stagnant anoxic water, which means that there
was no oxygen in it. And that's a very easy situation
to happen over the winter. Because, like I said, this plant isn't really sucking up much water at all. So be mindful of your water, try to protect them from the rain. That's the main tip I'd say
for over wintering here, especially if you're doing it outside. Now these two I did a little differently, I dug these out by the root ball and left the native soil intact when I put it into the new pots. So what that's done is, since I didn't sever
any of the main roots, all the foliage is still
supported and alive. Again, no problem with that, after maybe a month, couple weeks, I'll come back and trim this again. Eventually I might up pot these into a one gallon container like this, just to make sure that it
has everything it needs. Another thing I'll say
is that on this habanada, it actually was about
this big when I dug it out and had fruit and everything
was droopy and sad. So I actually removed all of
it and now it's bounced back. (gentle music) Before we move on to the next thing, I wanna show you guys how to
over winter, which is eggplant, I wanted to talk about why I dug up some of those peppers to over winter them and give you guys another option. At least those of you and warmer climates, like me in zone 10b. So this here is a very special pepper, this is a ancho poblano and, if you watched my first tour video on the Epic Gardening YouTube channel, I mentioned that my girlfriend bought some tomato plants and some peppers and that's how everything here started. Well, this is one of the first plants. This is one of the original
peppers that she had purchased and it's been in the ground ever since. So coming on two years pretty soon. And what you'll see is
that once the pepper has been over wintered, especially
when it's been in ground, it'll start to become
a lot more like a tree. So this down here, it's
very woody, it's very hard. It doesn't feel supple and
green like these guys here. It feels very much like a piece of wood. And that happens over time. As the pepper gets older,
it'll start to become more lignified and it'll
get this kind of bark to it, which is perfectly fine. It's a normal life cycle of a pepper that it starts to develop more of this kind of barky look to it. But same basic idea as
you would do it in a pot. You wanna trim it down to
some sort of base structure. So in this case I have
like three main branches and that's it. So managing the watering here will be a little more challenging, since it's in the ground, I
can't really do much about it. But luckily this is a much
more established plant so it has roots going all throughout. So chances are it won't immediately drown if there's a lot of water here because it's got plenty of other roots, probably spread all throughout
this area here around me. So the main reason I dig
up other pepper plants and choose to leave some
is that that other pepper, for example, was in a bed
that I wanted to replant. So digging it up was giving me the option of regrowing something in that same space. But if you are fine with where it is and don't really have a need for anything else to go in
there, then it's perfectly fine to just over winter it in the ground. And again, in our climate,
that's pretty easy. In cold air climates,
you're gonna have to do a lot of work to keep
it alive in the ground unless you get specific varieties
that can handle the cold. And there are actually some chili peppers that can withstand cold and
even snow and be totally fine. But for us, something
like an ancho poblano, totally fine to over winter in the ground. So now let's go talk about
eggplant back over there. So I know I say we were
gonna talk about the eggplant but it strikes me that I
actually have the perfect example of what a pepper is gonna do
once it has been over wintered and has gone into spring. So this pepper, which
I've pruned very heavily, is very typical for how a over
wintered pepper will look. Now, as you start getting into spring and the temperatures are picking up, there's more daylight hours, you're gonna start seeing your pepper exploding in new growth. And the way that happens is all along the main growing branches, you'll see little pops
of leaves coming out. And right now the way this is coming out doesn't look too bad, it
might kind of expand out and create a nice canopy
but, more realistically, what I have seen with
my over wintered peppers is that you'll have this kind of chaotic amount of leaves coming
out from everywhere. This is where like... So basically once you get to this point, you can just go ahead, pop
this right on the ground. As soon as you start getting
any amount of new growth at all the pepper is gonna do fine
going right on the ground, especially somewhere like zone 10b where you don't really
get to a dangerous point in terms of temperatures. Now, a note though, is
this amount of growth here does look really nice at the moment, but this is gonna create
a very chaotic canopy. So you're beginning, like when
you first start seeing this, this is the best time to
actually start thinking about the way you want your pepper to grow. So, for instance, I have
two little bits right here, two new sprouting growths, what I'm gonna do is
I'm gonna come through pinch off that one so that I don't have this tangle of branches here. What you wanna do is kind of
go through the whole plant, look where there's multiple emergences of new leaves coming out and sort of start thinning those out so that when this plant does kind of pop out and grow,
it creates a nice open canopy where you could reach in very easily, it's not gonna be too
clustered and crowded because these branches now
are going to be supporting the weight of all this new growth. So you really want to think
about some sort of control at that early stage of spring. But this is actually, honestly, probably what your plant is
going to look like in spring and this is a great point
to just take that plant, pop it in the ground off to the races. And that's all you really need to do. You could amend the planting site, but really over wintering is
as simple is being patient, waiting for the growth
to back and then, spring, just pop it in the ground. Just a quick note, if you are in a zone that's
colder than zone 10b, which is probably the majority of you, there's a couple other things you're gonna have to be concerned about. And mostly that's that, when you over winter
plants in a colder area, you have to take your plant
and usually bring it indoors, or it could die from the frost
exposure, the cold exposure. There are a couple other
steps you have to do. For instance, you wanna
make sure that there are zero pests on your plant or in the soil before you bring it inside, because that could
propagate once it's indoors. I'm not going to cover
pretty much any of those because I don't have any
personal experience with it. But the basic idea of how
you're gonna over winter, in terms of cleaning it up, pruning it, putting it into a pot of soil, are going to basically be the same. So if you are interested in over wintering in a colder climate, you're
probably going to need to do a little more supplemental research. What you see here are
four different eggplants that I have over wintered from last year. So very similar process to a pepper plant, where you're basically
trying to prune it down to a much smaller size to control its growth over the winter. Couple things that I would
mention about eggplant is that, even more so than a pepper,
eggplant really does need the heat to really start
growing and producing. So you'll find that your
eggplant will probably be the last of your solanaceous plants to really start getting going. So first will be your tomatoes, they seem to grow fine
in the colder spring, then your peppers, and then eggplant last. So over wintering eggplant is
really like the biggest boost you could get in terms
of eggplant production, because you're just
going to be so far ahead any other plant that you're gonna get. It's not just the size of
the plant that matters, it's actually the root system that it's built over that time. So these eggplant have
been in the ground now for over a year, which
means that their roots have really had a lot of
time to explore and fan out and sort of get into all
this different soil here. You'll see that the eggplant
furthest for me actually doesn't really look so good
so I'll bring in a closer shot so you guys can take a look at it. That's gonna be an example of a plant that I'm not willing to save
and over winter for next year, it's too far gone in my opinion. But actually what I'm
gonna do is just go ahead and start new egg plant seedlings today and over winter those
seedlings for next year. So that's another option,
a little bonus tip there. But next, what we're gonna do is actually shape and cut these back, so you guys could see the process, and I also really wanna talk
about why over wintering something like an eggplant doesn't mean you're actually losing this garden space. So that's gonna be a little
bonus tip at the end here. Now you guys saw an example of what a unhealthy
eggplant's gonna look like, one that I'm not gonna
be bothering to save, but here's one that looks quite healthy. So it has lots of new leaves,
they look pretty good, there's a little bit
of grasshopper damage, but nothing that's gonna affect the plant. Also, what I see is, somehow I missed, the biggest Oriental Express
eggplant that I've ever grown, which is what this variety is. So that's a nice little treat. Still feels really nice,
it's not like weird and firm, so I'll go ahead and eat that. But that's not what this is about. So let's take a look at the plant first. You'll see that its canopy
goes all the way out, it might be off screen there, but the main thing we're
gonna try to do first is control everything on the outside. Once you do that, it gets a lot easier to fix the rest of it. I'm also gonna come in and start cutting off
some of the dead growth. So I'll put that right up there. There's nothing in there it's... You could see, when I actually snap it, it just breaks, there's
nothing green inside. So that's totally a dead piece of branch. That's an easy cut. The rest of it might feel bad because you're basically cutting a plant that still looks like it's alive, but what's gonna happen is that, although the eggplant looks
like it's still growing, it's gonna have a really
hard time actually ripening all the fruit that it might set. And that's because the
temperatures are dropping to such a low degree that eggplant doesn't really wanna ripen
anything at that point. And what you'll see is that you might get some sort of ripening, but really, in the end, that
eggplant's just gonna rot and it's not gonna form a nice
fruit that you want to eat. So there's no point in trying to force it to do something it doesn't wanna do. All we're trying to do right now is trick it into basically surviving so that next year it'll give us everything that we want out of it. So couple big cuts here. You could see that this
is also quite woody, just like the pepper plant
that I showed you earlier. And, same idea, as the pepper, or the eggplant in this case, gets older it's gonna start becoming more lignified, so more woody, in all of its major trunks, especially anything that's really old. You'll see that the new growth has this kind of fuzzy purple look to it. And I could actually
just rub that right off, but as it gets older,
it's gonna start setting these woody branches and that's
why you could see all this kind of woody looking material
in the middle of this plant. So now I've kind of come around, I've taken down most of
the exterior branches. I'll get this out of the way. So I see a couple flowers, I
definitely wanna remove those. Again, I find that, just
like with the peppers, leaving some amount of
green on there is good because I don't want the plant
to completely stop growing, it's still in the soil after all, I just want it to not
really produce any fruit. So that's kind of the mindset
you want to have is not how do I entirely halt this plant? But how do I keep it alive
and happy without forcing it to produce all this fruit
that I don't want it to do? And now I've got basically
one major trunk coming up, there's an offshoot right there and then there's two major
offshoots right here. So it looks like I'm almost there. I'm gonna come through though I think I'm gonna chop
this branch off here. Actually, I'll go a little higher and give that a chance to
grow out in this direction. So that's another thing
you wanna think about is, anywhere that I'm pruning,
there's a good chance that could sprout from any
point on this right now. But basically you wanna
think about which way do you want this plant to grow next year? So I do want something going
this way, but not that much, 'cause I have this nice mallow behind me, but I have plenty of
growing room over here, which is why I'm leaving a
lot of that growth over here and a lot of that growth over here. Now I will come through and
take off any of the flowers because, like I said, they're very likely not going to survive anyway. There's still a little bit
too much leaf here for me so I'm gonna prune that. Anything that looks kind of ratty, I'm just gonna go ahead and take off. There's no point in leaving it behind. And you'll see that I'm taking off a lot of these big leaves. That's because they're the oldest so they're gonna die soon anyway, and I'm leaving all these
new kind of leaflets, you could see a little one
there, a nice pair right there, Those are gonna now take over as the primary leaf matter on this plant. But really that's all there is to it. Very similar to how you would do a pepper. But the rewards you
reap from over wintering an egg plant are just so high. I mean the fact that you
could prune this back and in the spring, you'll
actually have eggplant rather than having to wait
till summer is fantastic. So highly, highly recommend it. Definitely something you should do if you have any eggplant going in ground. And same principle as the pepper, you could actually dig
this out, put it in a pot, save it for next year. I'm opting to leave it in the ground. That's what I did last year
and it worked out well for me. Just a quick note on
eggplant is, anecdotally, I've heard that most eggplant production will slow down around year three. So this is going into
year two so next year I'll probably not over winter these again, but instead I'll opt to start a new plant. And this eggplant right next to me, I'm gonna just go ahead and
chop it while I'm talking, is actually one that I replaced as well. So I'll bring you in a little closer but you might be able to tell from there, but the trunk on this guy is
very much more substantial than the one over here. And that's because this one
was only planted this year. So this is now a six month old eggplant, whereas this is now a
18 month old eggplant. Another thing I'm gonna talk
about next is what to do with all the garden around
your over wintered plants. And the nice thing about it
is you could actually use all this growing space. So let's talk about that next. This is my favorite part
about over wintering actually, is that you lose literally nothing. I might have alluded to that earlier, but basically what I have
here is this eggplant bed is actually the very first
no-till bed that I created. And so in that same nature,
I'm gonna keep it going. And I'm just gonna bury the straw. This is all new compost that I got. And I'm gonna just try to be careful not to crowd the stem too much. It is woody so it's not gonna really want to root from there anymore. So really just, you could add new dirt, soil, compost, et cetera, but try to avoid not piling it up too high around your plants, especially
something like an eggplant. Tomato would be fine
because it can grow roots from anywhere that's
underground, but eggplant, especially one that's this
woody, try to avoid burying it. So basically what I'm doing here is I'm building this bed up, this
is gonna provide nutrients for the eggplant in the coming spring but also what it's gonna
do is let me grow something the whole entire winter
while this is over wintering. So I'm not gonna waste any garden space by doing this over wintering process. The fact that you prune
back all the foliage is going to allow the sun to come down into the garden bed floor here and, as the eggplant keeps growing, I'll just keep pruning it
back, any of the new leaves, because what I'm gonna plant and grow here is actually probably lettuce screens, either lettuce or arugula. I'm going to go ahead
and seed this all out and that's gonna do two things: it's going to keep life going in this garden bed all through winter, it's going to give me new space to grow in and, the most important
thing I think is that, it's going to give any water that comes into contact with
this bed somewhere to go. So we don't want these sitting in water, same idea as the peppers, if
they sit in water for too long, they're not gonna be very happy and there's a good chance they could die. So, by growing something alongside it, it's actually gonna give that
water some sort of purpose and the arugula or the lettuce
or whatever I plant here is actually gonna be
able to use that water. And that's gonna keep these
egg plants basically happy. And really that's all there is to it. You just want to kind of keep this not dry but you definitely don't
wanna overwater it. And don't be afraid to grow
anything you want around this. Anything that's in the
winter that isn't that big. Like I wouldn't plant a
broccoli or a cabbage here because those are pretty aggressive in terms of their root
size and their growth. But lettuces, arugula, grains, beets, all that could go in
here without any issue. And there's no reason whatsoever
to waste this garden space. And there you have it, there's three over wintered egg plants. You might have seen that little clip of me cutting out the fourth one. And then all I really did is
take compost and apply it, maybe half an inch to an inch thick, right on top of this bed, I buried all the straw underneath and you could see actually
around the eggplants that I've over wintered, some
of the straw sticking out because I did not go around them here. And that's to avoid
rot on the plant there. All I did after that is
I spread the compost, I firmed it with my hand
and then I just sprinkled arugula seed all along the bed. So hopefully in a week or two, I'll have a nice bed of arugula here and I've lost nothing in the process of having eggplant for spring next year. So I highly recommend you
guys all try this at home. There's really no downside, except for maybe holding onto disease. If you've made it this far in the video, thanks for watching. This one might have been a
little bit on the longer side, but I really wanted to
get in and show you guys exactly what's going on when I over winter a eggplant or pepper and
kind of give you an example of the different things that you might see and different things you might encounter. And I really hope you guys give it a try this year or next year, any year, and I hope you guys also go
ahead and utilize your garden to its fullest extent possible. Like for instance, this eggplant, which will now be a salad
bed over the winter. And with that in mind, I hope
you guys enjoyed the video. If you guys did, I really
appreciate a thumbs up or a like, and until next time garden hermits out.
