How and When to Harvest Peppers

Peppers are my favorite plant to grow for food. They produce many fruits with little input, and they’re incredibly low maintenance. If you planted some this season, chances are you’ll grow more than you can eat at once. Fear not, as we’ll cover how and when to harvest, and we’ll show a few different ways to extend your harvest past your first frost date.

No matter the variety, pepper harvesting occurs in the same way for all types. Peppers start flowering and fruiting in late spring, and they’ll continue producing until fall frost arrives. Watch your plants closely and you’ll see the plants adapt to these different seasons.

If you planted serranos or bell peppers, these harvesting guidelines apply. Sweet, hot, and heirloom peppers benefit from similar care at harvest time. Follow along and learn how to collect those delicious and juicy chile peppers, no matter the kind. 

When Are Peppers Ready?

Peppers mature in stages, and the color of the chile pepper easily determines them. Some varieties like ‘Poblano’ and ‘Jalapeño’ have different flavors depending on their ripeness. When you let jalapeños ripen, dry, and smoke them, they become chipotle peppers. 

Simply because others eat peppers at a certain stage does not mean you have to! Try sampling your varieties at different ripening stages to determine what flavor and spiciness level you like best.

Immature Peppers

Some of the most commonly eaten green peppers are unripe and immature. Green bell peppers, serranos, and poblanos are all examples of this. 

Spicy peppers have less capsaicin when they’re younger, so they are also less spicy than their ripened, colorful counterparts. Capsaicin is a chemical that peppers naturally grow—it gives their fruits a punchy heat. Some other types to eat when immature or mature are Thai chiles like ‘Santaka’ and ‘Thai Hot.’ 

Green peppers cook well and are important components of seasoning bases for Cajun, Puerto Rican, and Latin cuisines. Because they are unripe, their bitter flavor blends well when pan-seared in oil with aromatics like onions, garlic, and celery. 

Harvest green peppers when they’re the size of a mature fruit but are still green. They need fewer days to be ready than ripe peppers, and they’ll be ripe for picking early in the growing season. Watch closely, as they often hide amongst the green, lush foliage their plants produce. 

Mature Peppers

Fully-mature peppers are any types you let ripen completely on the bush before picking them. Most fruits ripen to delicious reds, oranges, and yellows. There are now cultivars like ‘Purple Bell’ that turn a gorgeous black-purple color on the outside while remaining green on the inside. 

You’ll notice mature fruits are ready for harvest when they’ve turned from green to their final color, and when they are plump and strong. If you squeeze the ready pepper with a small force, it should resist and retain its shape. 

Mature peppers tend to be spicier, sweeter, and more flavorful than green ones. Use them in stir-fries, salsas, and cooking bases. Store ripe fruits in the fridge, and they’ll last for one to two weeks. Dry them on your countertop or freeze them in a container for long-term storage.

How to Harvest

One year, I was trimming my plants and noticed my hands had a burning sensation. I had no idea what it was until I learned that spicy pepper plants have capsaicin throughout their bodies! They can cause a burning sensation on your skin when you touch them. Avoid this by wearing gloves that protect your hands and wrists.

Identify

Whether tending one or many chile pepper plants, you’ll want to find the fruits you’d like to harvest. Select green or mature and colorful fruits, depending on how you’d like to use them in recipes. 

After you know which ones you’d like to eat, identify any overripe or rotting fruits. When they ripen, they trick your plant into thinking it’s completed seed production. The more seeds it produces early in the growing season, the fewer flowers and new fruit it forms throughout summer. 

Snip

With your hand pruners or herbal snips, slice off each pepper at its stem. You’ll want to have part of the stem attached when they’re cut off. Avoid ripping them off with your hands, as this can damage the plant. Pruning gives the pepper plants a clean cut they heal easily from. 

For large, thick-stemmed varieties, I recommend using hand pruners to harvest. Kinds like bell peppers grow trunks as thick as tree branches! With a proper hand pruner, you’ll never have to mangle a pepper plant again.

Herbal snips are a fantastic option for other types, like the Thai chiles mentioned above. These varieties have twig stems, and the fruit easily snips off the plant. Herbal snips are also thinner and reach into small spaces better than hand pruners. This is an excellent function for harvesting bunches of peppers amongst bunches of foliage and stems, allowing you to reach in and make precise cuts.

Gather

Grab that harvest basket and fill it full! Don’t forget to take a picture of all those pretty peppers to share with your gardening friends. As you gather, determine which to store long-term and which to use fresh. 

Extend Your Harvest

As peppers require a long growing season full of warmth and sunshine, gardeners with short growing zones may have trouble getting their plants to produce high yields. Use these two common techniques to extend your harvest and have peppers ripening amid fall frost.

Cold Frame

Cold frames are excellent garden adaptations that trap heat under a protective covering. The trapped heat, along with the sunshine that peeks through, helps chiles ripen fully. 

Cold frames come in a wide range of shapes and sizes, and they play off of a basic structure. In raised beds or the ground, install half-moon metal hoops into the ground. Then, drape greenhouse plastic over the metal moons and clamp them down. 

A cold frame is like a mini greenhouse. Any range of structures will do, so long as they trap heat and let sunshine in. To help with airflow, open up the flaps on warm days for wind and moisture to blow through. 

Containers

I like to grow chiles in containers, as they offer portability and protection during extreme heat, cold, and rain. During heat waves, I move the plants under shade. During cold, wet fall weather, I place them under an awning for protection.

Cheat the seasons and store a container-grown pepper by a sunny windowsill this year. Bring it inside before your first frost in autumn. Simply monitor it for pests, and water the soil when the top few inches are dry. With enough indoor sunlight, your crop will continue ripening!