When to Plant Peppers

Planting time for peppers is set by your frost dates, not by the calendar month. Start seeds indoors about 8 weeks before your last spring frost, then transplant about 2 weeks after it. From there it takes roughly 80 days to the first harvest. Peppers is a tender crop, and a single light frost ends it, so both ends of its season are hard boundaries. Pick your zone below for exact dates, or find your zone by ZIP if you are not sure which one you are in.

Peppers set fruit poorly above 90 degrees, so a late-summer planting often out-produces the spring one in hot-summer zones. Because it is a tender crop, the fall sowing has to finish before the first frost with no margin for error, so the sow-by dates in the table above are hard deadlines rather than suggestions.

Fall dates are counted backward from your first frost, not forward from a sowing date. Take the 80 days peppers needs, add about two weeks because growth slows once days shorten after the equinox, then add two more weeks of margin because frost kills it outright. That is 108 days before your first frost. The coldest zone where this still works on the averages is Zone 6b.

For the whole-garden version of this arithmetic, see the fall planting calendar by zone, and how to read and stretch your first frost date.

Peppers grow well next to basil, onions and carrots. A nightshade like tomatoes, so it shares their companions; no strong keep-apart pairing beyond general soil rotation. The full grid for all 24 crops is in the companion planting chart.