Planting Multiple Peppers in 1 Pot - Pepper Geek

Hey there, welcome back to Pepper Geek. In today's video I'll be discussing planting multiple peppers in the same pot together. So for the most part we do recommend planting one pepper plant per pot and just tailoring the size of the pot to your pepper varieties, but there are some situations where you may want to grow multiple plants in the same pot together. So today we're going to discuss the benefits and the drawbacks of doing so and I'll show you a few examples that we grew this year to show you some of the results. Before I get started, check us out on Instagram. We're posting lots of pictures of our ripening peppers as they come. You can see some behind the scenes pictures of the coolest peppers we're growing this year and many to come. So if you're interested, follow us at Pepper Geek on Instagram. So the first thing to discuss is choosing your varieties. There are some pepper varieties that grow to be very large even in a single season and require more soil space as a result. These include the ghost pepper and habaneros. Our biggest plant by far this year is a ghost pepper plant. It's about five feet wide in every direction and of course it's planted by itself in a seven gallon container, but there are other varieties like this jalafuego plant here that don't require as much soil space and if you were planting it in its own pot, I might recommend a three gallon pot or something like that. That would be plenty of soil to give this plant all the nutrients it needs for the year. So if you're planting multiple peppers in the same pot together, you might want to choose smaller plant varieties. Those would be less susceptible to competing for nutrients in the soil and water and everything else that the plant gets out of the soil to grow. Also if you have a taller plant, you can still plant it together in a pot with another pepper, but you might want to make sure it's on the north side so that it doesn't shade the other pepper plant that you have in there with it. And this pot right here is a perfect example of that. There are three different pepper plants in here, all different varieties, and the one in the back is very tall. That is the pumpkin yellow plant. Over here is the jalafuego. It's a little bit shorter. And then up front we have the jigsaw plant which was a lot shorter and that was on the south facing side. So what are the benefits of planting multiple peppers in the same pot? Well number one is you get to plant more varieties. If you're like us and you like to grow new varieties every year, this will enable that. You'll get to grow more pepper varieties and taste more flavors and try new things. So even though you may not get as many peppers at the end of the year, you'll at least get to try them out. Another benefit that goes hand in hand with that is the aesthetics. This has been sort of an ornamental plant for us. We have it on our front step and it's got a splash of color and it's got these beautiful yellow peppers and the red peppers and you've got this purple and white variegated leaves. It's just a great thing to look at. It's nice to see them all right next to each other and I think they complement one another really well. And another benefit is no wasted soil. If you have a very large pot but you plan to grow smaller plants, you can get more out of your soil by planting multiple plants in that large container. So now on to some drawbacks. Number one is crowding. The plants are going to be closer to one another than they would otherwise be if they had their own container and so you're basically dividing a larger pot into multiple smaller pots within the same growing space. You can sort of think of it like a very crowded raised bed. These three plants are about six inches from one another stem to stem and that's just about as far as I could get them away from each other without planting them right against the wall of the grow bag. And I have no doubt that any one of these plants would have grown to be larger if it had this pot all to itself. But I'm still not disappointed with the yield and the size of the plants in this pot together. So that's another drawback. Yield per plant will definitely be reduced if your plants are crowding each other. The plants are sharing the nutrients in the soil so there won't be as much nutrition and soil space for each plant to perform at its optimal level. But if you choose the right size pot for your multiple plants you shouldn't have as much of a drawback there. And yield shouldn't really be an issue if you're growing smaller varieties like these jigsaws. These are tiny half-inch pods and there are dozens and dozens of them on this plant. Really not a problem there. But this Jalafuego plant really only has maybe six or seven peppers that seem to be full-sized and I'm pretty sure that this plant would have produced better on its own. Another point to make on overcrowding is that one plant will tend to dominate when you're planting multiple together. In this case it was the Faye Pumpkin Yellow. It could just be that the physiology of this plant is stronger than the others and it would have been a larger plant regardless. But it certainly seems to have taken over in this case and it's got more peppers and it looks healthier than all the others. So it's likely got a larger root system in this pot compared to the other plants. So now I'll actually switch pots here. This is the Pequilo de Lodosa pepper. We have two of the same pepper variety planted in this small one gallon pot. So there are two plants in here and one of them is definitely outperforming the other. You can see on this side this plant looks pretty healthy, pretty large, almost like it's on its own. And then there's this little guy over on the right hand side which is only producing a few peppers and it's just overall a smaller size. Both plants are producing peppers but the smaller one has about half the number of peppers as the larger one. So case in point one plant dominated over the other. That leads me to another point and that is if you plan to overwinter your peppers you want to keep them alive through the winter and plant them again in the spring. You may not want to do this because separating the plants would definitely be more of a challenge if you needed to do that. Of course you could keep them together in the same pot while they're overwintering but I wouldn't recommend doing it. And one other reason I might not do this is if you're planting something special you might want to give more attention to that plant. If you're growing something new and unique that you're excited about, you really want it to be a success, I would give that plant its best chance at success by giving it its own container and give it everything that it needs for the plant to stay healthy through the season. One quick thing I forgot to mention is the idea of cross pollination. If you are saving your seeds to grow again in the next season and you don't want to risk the possibility of an accidental hybrid then I probably wouldn't recommend planting the plants in the same container. Of course cross pollination can still happen even if your plants are across the yard from one another but it probably does lead to a higher likelihood if you have the plants in much closer proximity. Of course this only matters if the plants you're planting are different varieties. If they're the same variety then it doesn't really matter because cross pollination won't make a difference. And it really only matters if you're planning on saving the seeds so always remember that. So one common question we get about planting multiple peppers in the same container is will you get more peppers with more plants if you plant them in the same container together? And we haven't properly tested this yet but this is again a good example where we have two plants of the same variety in the same pot and all I can say is I think it's about comparable to what we could have expected if we just planted one plant in this container versus two. You can see the second plant here is sort of filling in the space where this plant is not growing so I imagine this plant would have just had more soil space, more root system, and would have filled in all this space and grown those peppers on its own. The most important thing if you want a higher yield is to choose an appropriately sized pot. We have a video all about choosing container size for pepper plants so I'll leave that in the description below and up here. And this is our last example. This is the Kangstar White Thai plant in the back here and up front we have the Numex Lata Lutean Serrano. It's a yellow serrano pepper. We have a ripe one coming in there. And as you can see one plant again dominated here and the serrano plant down here is much smaller, much fewer peppers, but it's doing okay. Both plants are still very healthy and they look happy together. So if you plan to do this we have some tips. Number one is choose a larger pot. The bigger the pot the better. Like I said you're basically dividing your pot into multiple smaller pots within the same growing space so keep that in mind. We'd recommend at least a five gallon pot but seven, nine, ten gallons would be ideal if you're planning on doing three or four peppers in the same pot. This is about a four gallon pot with these two plants. The grow bag that I showed you at the beginning of the video is about a seven gallon container with three pepper plants in it and the small Pequillo de Lodosa was in a one gallon pot. Another tip is to plant the plants closer to the edge, not all the way at the edge of the pot, but give the plants some space between their main stems to avoid competition from an early stage. You really want those root systems to grow out and get what they need from all of the available soil space. Eventually the root systems of course will clash somewhere down in the middle of the soil but give them a good start by planting them away from the center of the pot like you normally would. So that's it. I hope you enjoyed this video. I think it's a really fun way to garden a little bit differently and try more pepper varieties. Let me know your thoughts and if you've done this before. We'd love to see your plants so hashtag Pepper Geek on Instagram and don't forget to follow us while you're there. Thanks for watching Pepper Geek and I'll see you next time.