I start my peppers around mid Feb to put out the 3rd week in April. Our last frost date is 4/15 but I wait about a week. Peppers don't like real chilly nights. In zone 5 you may want to start them in March to put out about 8 weeks later, a week or so after your last frost date (whenever that is where you live). Once in the ground, if fertile and not they're not put out too soon, they grow rapidly.

Just for a little clarification...I was planning on doing the growing in big pots on a big open deck upstairs as I dont have a viable place for an proper garden. Weather here is odd. During april it can be very cold at night and very warm during the day. For example right now it dips into 40s during the night and today it got up to almost 90 during the day. The cayenne peppers dont seem to mind it and are flowering and producing like crazy.

Would it make sense to try to grow them under grow lights and put them outside when they grow bigger inside?

Just to jump in to this, I am also in zone 5 (mid-michigan). I usually start my seeds, like greenhauser says, around the first part of march, indoors under 2 4' flourescent grow lights. My plants do quite well and I usually end up waiting until the first of june to put them out into the garden or into pots on my deck ( the weather here is also pretty erratic, with snow one minute, and 75 degrees later the same day). I've gone and put them out as early as the first couple weeks of may, and you're welcome to do the same, but just keep an eye on the weather and be willing to throw some plastic or cloth of some kind over them if'n the temps dip tooo low. You'll have peppers as early as august 1, depending on varieties.

Mike

Hi zenith,

Ill add my input in addition to greenhouser2 and MikeÂs.

I'm located North of the 49th in Ontario. In my experience we zone 5 growers need to start peppers indoors to get a jump start on out shorter growing season. That being said, how soon you need to start really boils down to the variety your growing. Longer season varieties like Bhut Jolokia, Habanero, Scotch Bonnets need to be started earlier. Last year I started my Bhuts on January 5 and my Habs Feb 20ish. I started my Cayenne, Thai and sweeter varieties mid March. Depending on the weather, I usually start hardening off my starts late April to Early May. Weather permitting, I try to get them outdoors full time by mid May.

I usually grow in the ground but all were grown in 5 gallon pots this year due to blight issues last year in my garden. IÂll be growing my 2010 in pots as well just to make sure the blight is dead.

Hope this helps,

Bill

Here's my method for 2010.

Determine to the best of your ability the date in your area when nighttime temperatures will no longer drop below 55. For me, in Virginia, that is around May 20. That is the transplant date.

A week before that, begin daytime hardening off, so for me that's May 13. Leave 'em out for an hour, then 2 hrs, then 3, etc, but take them in any night it's going to drop below 55.

Count backwards 9 weeks from that hardening off period (and 10 weeks from the target transplant date) and that's the date to sow seeds indoors for capsicum anuums such as Jalapenos, so here in VA that'd be March 10. For chinenses, go backwards another 10-14 days, so that'd be around February 25-28.

Then grow them under the strongest lights you can afford, and surround them with mirrors, because otherwise, they will get very leggy indoors and it could lead to a season-long struggle to get them to branch out appropriately.

Check out the predicted frost date and sprout your seeds before that.

hey magachili
i just went and checked my average low temps for my area code 98261 on weather underground. if i went by your way of bringing them in ANY night it gets below 55, then i would NEVER be able to have peppers outside. my highest average low is 48 for july and august.....so my reccomendation for zenit would be to ask local growers of peppers when they start peppers and better yet when they set them out. i would love it if we had higher low night temps, but we don't, and if i only listened to recomendations, then i would think it would not be possible to grow peppers here....but i didn't have a computer to look at GW when i decided to start growing pepperes and MOST years i get a product. they do better if the plants are in a greenhouse, hoophouse, or whatever cover......but i do have plants that are grown outside. i try to grow them out as long as i can inside, harden off, and try to have plants in grow pots a week before solstice at the latest. one of these days i may live in a warmer climate, but for now i keep on keepin on....because otherwise i'd have to buy from the store...and its just not the same flavor

well looking at average weathers it looks like I should be able to put them out some time in may.

Like t-bob the night temperatures here are low even in the summers (I live in utah at altitude). Even in the summer when it is in high 90s during the day the temperature at night can drop into high 50s. For last month or so it has been in high 40s-mid 50s at night and the few peppers I have growing are doing very well, still setting fruit. I did take them inside the two nights when it got down into 30s. But these cayennes and two mystery ones just might be some hard to kill strains or something.

My other question is - would it be dumb to start seeds a few months early and just grow them inside during the winter/spring, so I would have a pretty much adult plant by the time may comes for max fruiting? Or is pepper a plant that does not respond well to indoor growing? What is the main down-side for starting the plants way too early?

In any case it might just make a fun experiment to start some now and some in february and see which ones survive and do better.

t bob, that's good feedback on my feedback. I guess the ultimate solution is, one does whatever will work in the area you happen to live in. Somewhere on the arctic circle is some guy with no web access to Garden Web and no information growing a jalapeno and getting a pod or two...LOL I heard the "55 rule" from a grower at a big nursery here called Debaggios. I was looking to do an early to mid May transplant, and he said, no, wait for consistent > 55 nighttime temperatures, to around May 20. He was right...my earlier plants had fewer and smaller pods than the ones that waited for the higher nighttime temperatures. We recently had 2 nights in the 40's and that seemed to bring the pod growth to a screetching halt. They were happily producing a robust 2nd harvest until those cold nights last week, but they really seem to have called it quits now in terms of new growth.

However, along the lines of your post, I think one can get wrapped too tightly around the web-recommended metrics when you just have to try things out to see what happens. For instance, I read from many sources that peppers want 6-8 hours of direct sun, and won't even waste their time with less than 4-5 hours. Well, I only have 50 square feet available that gets 5 hours of direct sun. Another 10 sf that gets 3 hours, and then around 60 sf that gets no more than 2. That latter area is trapped between a house and woods, blocking the sun except between 11:30 to 1 pm, but is the largest space I have for gardening. And guess what, every single square foot on my property produced peppers this year. Now, the area with the real sunlight produced more, better peppers. But even the area with the 1.5 to 2 hrs of direct sun produced a fatali with > 40 pods, a Jaloro with > 30, a handfull of cayennes and serranos with 10-15, and a yellow drop with 20. So it can be done, if not perfectly, the moral of the story being to give it a shot and see what happens.

Zenit: I think if you grow indoors under really good lights it'd probably be OK to start some super-early to see what happens. Here's the experience I had growing indoors with plenty of lead time (around 11-12 weeks). My lights were weak. So the plants got super-super leggy and tall. Then, when they were transplanted, they stayed with that theme of growing up and up and up. I have several 6 foot tall peppers that are supposed to be 24-36 inches. But that is not a good thing. That unusual vertical growth comes at the expense of filling out the foliage in the middle, and ultimately leads to low yield / small pods. Thus, I had a half dozen plants this year that were taller than me and yielded 5 to 8 pods, instead of the expected 25-30. So.....it's worth trying as an experiment, but mother nature's design is hard to mess with successfully. She wants to see 8 to 10 week old plants at transplant. It all comes down to the lighting - you need a strong light, right in the face of those plants; every inch away from the leaves that those lights are will cost you severely in terms of legginess and, down the road, poor pod development. The young plants crave sun, and they react strangely to 0.01 of sun, which it seems is what a cheap flourescent light too far away from the leaves delivers. But good luck and do share your results here if you try it

If your peppers are planning to grow as slowly as my Bolivian Rainbows, start them now! I started mine in late January, I think, and put them out in early May, when they were about 2" tall.

so zenit,
since you are in altitude and live in utah, if i were you, i'd be looking for short period fruiting peppers. i live at elevation less than 200, but my quickest ripening pepper the last 2 years(only 2 years i've grown it) is a pepper called "cochiti" and is from a pueblo in new mexico of the same name which is over 6000 feet elev. i would think a good place to do research would be peppers grown in new mexico since it is close and they grow tons of peppers there....and not just in the hatch area. check out new mexico state university site for pepper research. they do lots of research there. good luck with it...time for work