Pepper Plant Propagation: How To Clone Pepper Plants

In a previous post, we described how to winterize your pepper plants using a popular method that involves putting them in pots and bringing them indoors during the colder weather.

But, what if your plants are really big and it’s not feasible to do this?

You can take a cutting!

About Plant Propagation (Cloning)

Essentially, you clone the mother plant. This process enables you to quickly increase the amount of hot pepper plants you have, and it ensures the new plants retain the characteristics of the original.

How cool is that?!?

Here’s how you do this:

As you can see, taking a cutting is an easy process. It’s also much faster than starting seeds from scratch.

And if you grow hybrid peppers, you know that preserving desirable features, such as heat level and color, are questionable.

Pepper plant propagation solves this problem.

Tips For Taking a Plant Cutting

Always choose a healthy mother plant so the clones have a better success rate.
Sterilize all of your equipment and make sure your hands are clean so you don’t inadvertently transfer bacteria to your new plant.
Use distilled water for best results.
DO NOT remove any dead or dying growth on your cutting until it’s finished rooting. Doing this prematurely can make the plant die.
Take twice as many cuttings as you plan to grow. This way, you have backups in case some of the plants fail.

So now you have another option for overwintering and growing your pepper garden. You’ll see that this process gets easier as you do it more often.

(NOTE: After you get your hot pepper plants going, be sure to use these best practices for protecting them against diseases and bugs.)

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