Vegetable · Solanaceae
When to plant sweet peppers
Slower off the mark than tomatoes and less forgiving of cold soil. Peppers sulk below 15C and may drop flowers entirely.
Start seed indoors
8 weeks before
Counted from your last spring frost.
Plant out
2 weeks after
Counted from your last spring frost.
Days to maturity
60-90
From planting out to a first picking.
Those weeks become real dates once you name a place.
Timing, in frost-relative terms
Seed packets rarely give calendar dates, because a date that suits one latitude is wrong at another. They give offsets from the last spring frost instead, and those offsets are what make sweet peppers plantable anywhere.
- Start seed indoors 8 weeks before the last frost.
- Plant out 2 weeks after the last frost.
- Expect 60–90 days to maturity, counted from planting out.
Getting the timing right
Peppers germinate slowly and unevenly below 24C, so start them two weeks ahead of tomatoes. Bottom heat makes a bigger difference here than for any other common vegetable.
Frost tolerance
Frost kills peppers outright, but the more common failure is chilling injury: a week of nights near 5C stunts a young plant for the rest of the season without visibly damaging it.
Classified as tender, with damage expected below 0.5°C (32.9°F)32.9°F (0.5°C).