Growing Peppers in a Hanging Planter – Hanging Pepper Plants

I’m sure you’ve seen the hanging tomato baskets and planters, especially those that have upside down tomatoes growing out of them. These are great for apartment balconies or patios. It turns out that there are many advantages to growing plants in hanging planters. And for a number of reasons, it can be easier to grow peppers in a hanging planter than it is tomatoes.

Some of the advantages of growing hanging pepper plants include:

Reduced soil borne diseases – You typically use fresh soil each year or a potting soil, so those worries are gone.

No cages – Larger peppers need some support, typically like a tomato or pepper cage. With hanging planter this is not a problem.

Very few weeds – Once again, fresh soil and a limited soil surface area for weeds to germinate.

Earlier Production – Because the soil bag is elevated, it will warm more quickly than the soil, so you can get peppers earlier. Also, you can put them out earlier, and if a frost threatens you can move the planter in the garage or basement to protect the pepper plants.

One of the more common complaints with hanging planters when growing tomatoes is that the plants get too large, and need daily watering during the heat of the summer, and sometimes won’t make it through the summer. One of the main reasons this happens is that gardeners will try to grow indeterminate tomatoes or other large tomato plants that just keep growing larger over the course of the summer, getting to be 8 feet tall or more for something like a cherry tomato. And if you look at these planters, you can see that there is not enough soil for a root system to hold enough water to keep such a large plant going.

But most pepper plants don’t get that large, and it’s easy enough to find small varieties like some of the chile peppers that don’t come close. So the biggest problem with hanging planters can easily be minimized by a smart choice of pepper plants that fit the planter you want to hang.

For peppers you can take one of two approaches. For larger peppers like bell peppers or even jalepenos, you will want to use one of the upside down planters to give the plant plenty of room to grow. Many gardeners have success using the Topsy Turvy planters for peppers, or if you want to grow more than one, or you aren’t able to hang a reasonably heavy planter you may want to use the upside down tomato garden, which has room for 4 plants and stands on a platform so you don’t need to carry the planter and find a place to hang it.

For smaller pepper plants like many of the chili peppers, you can successfully grow more than two plants in a hanging planter like the Topsy Turvy Hanging Pepper Bag. This is made more for the smaller peppers, but it will hold several of them, and instead of hanging upside down the pepper grow out of the bag sideways and then hang down the side of the bag.