My only suggestion other than patience is to pick a few and put them in a paper bag with an apple to ripen the peppers. It seems to work with tomatoes (never tried it myself though) so I think it should work with peppers.

Rodney

Any possibility you can get them out sooner in the future?

Or have them be more mature transplants when you do? Maybe start from seed in Jan and then pot up if it's still too cool in Apr/may.

For now, you may want to let the soil dry out more than usual. Stress may tell the plants that it's time to propagate. Best chance for propagation is RIPE fruit.

Maybe lay down some black or clear(if the days aren't too hot) plastic to warm the soil before your impending fall temps.

Like rodney said, you can "try" the bag method, but peppers aren't like toms. They don't produce ethylene nearly as much as toms. However, peppers with at least some color, SOMETIMES, will ripen before they start to rot and/or shrivel.

You may be screwed this year though -- my problem with certain peppers is not having them START to turn color, but FINISHING. Colored bells jalapenos, and the superhots, in particular. Sometimes, it takes a month or 2 from starting to turn to actually finishing. It's a shame because I love colored bells and HATE green bells.

Good luck.

Kevin

It sounds like you are missing the first fruit set and only getting the late one, which doesn't ripen in time. Push early growth with organic liquid fertilizer, and provide shade covers if necessary to reduce stress when the first flush of blossoms appear. Small-fruited varieties like Apple and Lipstick will set fruit better in humid weather than some of the big bells. If you can't get bananas to ripen, there is a fertility problem.

OK, I'll throw a few ideas out there, maybe something will ring true.

I'm wondering... are the peppers in partial shade? That might be the cause - at least partly - of the slow development. The more sun, the better.

Soil fertility & the use of fertilizer could also be a factor. Too much fertilizer could cause heavy leaf growth early in the plants' development, at the expense of early flowering. As much as it may fly in the face of conventional wisdom, to get peppers to ripen early, less fertilizer might be better. I grew a long-season lima twice in my very fertile rural plot, and both times it was pushing frost before I was able to collect dry seed, with many immature pods left hanging after the freeze. This year I grew the same lima in one of my home gardens, in an area which had been scalped during construction & has relatively poor fertility. The lima flowered & set pods much earlier, and I harvested a heavy crop of dry seed & plenty of frozen limas. Yeah, that was beans, not peppers... but it is an example of the inverse relationship I have sometimes observed between soil fertility & DTM.

Heat or water stress could be a factor, if it caused the early blossoms to drop. A heavy mulch around the plants preserves moisture, and helps to moderate the humidity... and peppers thrive in humidity. Combined with close spacing, this produces a micro-climate around the plants that is more conducive to blossom set. I have used this technique successfully in my short summers.

All that being said... bells are temperamental. It's easy to get loads of green peppers, but harder to get them to ripen in quantity unless you have a fairly long season. I love "Chocolate Bell" and "Orange Bell", but they ripen very inconsistently for me, so I seldom grow them now. There are varieties bred for short seasons (like "King of the North" and "Sweet Chocolate") that might perform better. And although I am generally not a fan of hybrids, I have had good luck getting "Big Bertha" to ripen in my climate.

The last thing I would suggest was a discovery I made while saving pepper seed. To get pure seed from several peppers, you need to prevent insects from cross pollinating them. I did this by building PVC cages, which I covered with the lightest grade of Agribon fabric. Some of each variety was caged for seed, while the rest of each variety went into a mass planting. To my surprise, the caged peppers had much better fruit set... so much so that I had to thin the peppers for some varieties. Those plants also ripened more peppers than the plants that were unprotected. It might be worth trying.

None of the above will help much this year, except maybe the cages, which could provide some protection from the first few (light) frosts & increase the temperature around the plants. What also might help is to pick off all immature peppers except those which are the most developed, so that the plants can direct their energy into ripening the largest peppers.

I usually get a good amount of red peppers here in NH but I think our cold wet period in early summer probably made them have a late start. Blossom drop if it's too cold at night? I wonder if zeedman is onto something with the light agribon cages. Might have helped provide just enough warmth for the plants to do better than the uncaged ones.

Last year my husband built a high tunnel for me. I wasn't sure what I would do with it during summer but I ran out of space and planted some tomatoes in the tunnel. Despite sides rolled up and door left open, it made an amazing difference. Lush plants inside, decrepit tomato plants outside which got diseased.

I plant most of my peppers against the south side of the house. They do pretty well but not as good as in past years so I think the cold nights just got them off to a late start. I have some turning red now but I'm lucky that the unusually warm October has let me leave them on the plants longer.

Peppers will turn red with the apple and bag method (it's the apple that gives off the ethylene gas, not so much the peppers). Or at least they will if they are just starting to show color. I have a recipe that calls for using fresh red chilies and after looking unsuccessfully for them yesterday (I looked at both a farmers market and supermarket), I bought some serranos that were just barely at color break. After putting them in a paper bag with an apple, 24 hours later, three of the five are completely turned in color and the other two are at about 50% color.

So it does work. It will probably take a few extra days with a bell pepper though, as opposed to a chile, and that's if they are at color break. Although I'm not sure how well a bell pepper itself will hold up while waiting for it to change color and I'm not sure how it would work with a completely green pepper.

Rodney

Rodney: Serranos, in particular, turn much easier than most others. I have no idea why, they just do. You probably could've just left them out on the counter and they probably would've turned.

I grow a lot of varieties of peppers, both hot and sweet. And I've yet to get a bell which was picked green turn to final color before rot sets in... bag or no bag, apple or no apple, banana or no banana.

Even with a bell that has just a little green left and mostly turned, it's a crapshoot.

Nice thing about serranos though. I love the sweetness that develops.

Kevin

Ah, gotcha. See I didn't know that about serranos. That's interesting that they turn so easily.

Once I've picked them, I've never waited for my peppers to turn color before eating them so I haven't had a chance to observe how long it takes for certain pepper varieties to change color. But I did know that bells would take longer. Which is why I said I wasn't sure how well a bell pepper would hold up.

Rodney

Frost finally coming tonight, so those gardening in points East probably don't have long to wait either. No complaints, it's been unseasonably (and pleasantly) warm, a 1-year-in-10 October.

If the killing frost comes when a pepper is just beginning to ripen, I pull the entire plant by the roots & hang it in the garage. The plant responds by pulling moisture from the smallest immature fruits, and attempting to ripen the largest. This is highly effective with hot peppers intended for drying, but also works moderately well with larger sweet peppers. Peppers ripened this way are not as sweet as those ripened naturally, but still better than green... and it beats losing them to the frost.

Curious that you mention serranos. I have an heirloom serrano-type ("Red Chile") that I pulled out today. It has ripened only enough pods for me to save seed, probably due to the partial shade it had received from adjacent pole beans. The ripe peppers, when dehydrated, make a great pepper powder, and there are enough peppers close to maturity that they should turn color quickly now that the plants have been hung.

This is a fascinating thread and I learned a lot. Thank you to all of you for your input. I hopefully have another two or three weeks till first frost, but our temperatures have turned unseasonably cool here for October. Many of my peppers are rotting on the vine before they fully ripen. I will put some Agribon around the plants tomorrow. The plants are still loaded and I was hoping to get one more picking before calling it quits.