You can start them anytime you want,it is late in the season so growing full term is unlikely unless your in south Florida. You will have to keep them inside under lights all winter. Check your regions seasonal temp range and allow about 2 months lead time before moving outside. Be careful of "advise",some people choose crazy stupid expensive methods and resources as "the doctrine" The elitist speak in terms and references not of common man,funny bunch they are LOL! Just take your time and research basic garden growing and youll be fine. Best Of Luck!!

I do alot of seed trading (both veggies and flowers) mostly on that other well known garden forum. LOL. I always do peppers and have good luck with them too! Right now, as far as peppers go...I've got sweet looking for some hot varieties. What I have is: Calif Wonder (duh), orange sun sweet pepper, red cheese pepper, goliath hybrid (Totally tomatoes), and banana bill hybrid (also from TT). I'm really needing some Jalapeno (how I got down to none I'll never know!) and I'm really lusting for the following from Tomato Growers Supply Co. but you might have some of them: serrano, cayenne, salsa, airiane and lafayette yellow (last 2 not hot). I have your classic edible/perennial/annual/native mixed garden. LOL. Debbie

I have one of the Bonnie Ornamental plants in my raised beds. It is hard to keep up with harvesting the tiny pods off of it some days. I am also growing Big Thai. It grows them hanging down, and they seem to take forever to ripen. Just today I gleaned it. It yielded half a pound of long pods that are like crooked green beans. A local Indian grocery owner has been begging me to bring them in. They want them green. He can not keep enough of them in the market it seems. I gave him some of the smaller red ornamental ones as well. He wants the long green ones. Those are the ones the customers seem to prefer. Oh and the reason I took so many pods off of the plant is I am going to put it in the ground now. I took the pods off hoping to give the plant less of a shock.

Sadly, the 2019 growing season is winding down here in North Carolina and it's time for an update. Please note that many of my earlier posts in this thread were under username "Zonefive". I updated my profile to display "Zone 7b" when I moved south a couple of years ago. I only grew six mini pepper plants this year and they were from F5 seeds. Two of them produced fruit resembling the original fruit purchased at Aldi in early 2014. The seeds for these two were taken from a mixed collection of mini peppers harvested last year. The other four were taken from what appears to have been a single orange mini. I say that because there are very few seeds remaining in the seed packet labeled "orange mini 2018". The plants resulting from these orange mini seeds produced some aberrations. Two produced much larger (3-6 inch), broader, thicker skinned, sometimes multi-lobed, red fruit. The other two produced slightly larger (3-4 inch), thicker skinned, red fruit. One of which produced peppers that contained a fair amount of capsaicin, which was quite a surprise. The ripe fruit of this plant showed a slight amount of corking as is seen in jalapenos. I suspect that the single orange mini harvested for seed last year had been cross pollinated, resulting in the unusual fruit this season. Last year I grew several pepper varieties, including large bell and jalapeno, so there was plenty of pollen available. Perhaps a bee made its way through various pepper plants and then happened upon a flower on the orange mini plant that had just opened. Its activity there deposited pollen from several different plants resulting in the variations found this year. I plan on saving seed from some of these plants, especially the spicy one. The fruit of that plant retained the sweetness and crispness of the original orange mini, but in a larger, thicker fleshed, red fruit with a "kick" at the stem end. It will be interesting to see what the offspring of this plant produce next year. I don't expect too much variation since both the mother and the suspected father produce fruit similar in size and shape. Here's a picture of a couple of the spicy not-so-minis, which I call SweetFire. These two are about 3 inches long, not as long and not as broad at the stem as many were earlier in the season. If anyone is interested in growing out some of these SweetFire peppers, let me know and I'll send some seeds to you. Maybe we can make this a group effort by selecting promising offspring each season and sharing the seed. After several generations we may have a stable plant.