why not bring it inside again? we have tomato vines that we turned upside down in the garage because we were told that they would ripen that way.

I don't think you can do anything other than removing any more blooms so that the energy of the plant will go into existing peppers instead of continuing to make a lot more. Peppers always go crazy with regrowth and production in the fall because these are the conditions they love. Unfortunately, with fewer hours of sunlight per day and with much cooler temperatures, the fruit grow very slowly and it takes them at least a month longer than usual to reach their mature size (if they ever do) and another month beyond that to reach their full, mature color.

One winter I kept several pepper plants in containers growing and producing all winter long by dragging them into the well-insulated but unheated garage at night and on cold days, and dragging them back outside on warm, sunny days. That was before I had a greenhouse. They bloomed and set fruit all winter long, but the fruit stayed small forever and forever. Those specific peppers were a variety that usually got large and matured from green to red. That winter, the bell peppers stayed really small and matured from green to red when they were only a couple of inches long and wide. The upside was that as soon as spring arrived and the amount of sunlight per day increased and the temperatures increased, I had big, healthy plants blooming and setting fruit in April and May when new pepper plants were just going into the ground.

You can do the same thing with pepper plants that Jessaka is doing with the tomato plants. The fruit won't really enlarge much, if at all, after you pull the plants and hang them upside down in a garage or tornado shelter, but there normally is enough energy left in the plant for the green tomatoes to ripen up and color up over a period of several weeks. With peppers, since they can be harvested and used at any size and even while still green, you could pull the plants and hang them, but the peppers won't get bigger. Thus, it is just as productive to simply strip all the small peppers off the plants before the first freeze gets them. When hanging in the garage on plants that you've pulled up, they may or may not color up to their mature color, so I think it is less useful to do this with pepper plants than with tomato plants. Peppers seem a lot less happy in cooler weather than tomatoes, and tomatoes aren't that thrilled about maturing in cooler conditions. My uncle was the one who got me started on pulling up pepper plants loaded with fruit and hanging them in the garage to dry. He asked me one Thanksgiving if I wanted him to bring me "the last" of his hot peppers at Christmas if the plants lasted that late into the season and I said "sure". Imagine my surprise when he showed up with plants pulled up, root and all, right out of the ground, just covered with dozens and dozens of peppers per plant, and told me to hang them in the garage and harvest them for as long as they lasted. I harvested them for months. It is one of my favorite ways to keep a pepper harvest coming in the winter time, but keep in mind that I'm doing it with hot peppers that already are covered with tons of full-sized fruit in the fall. Bell peppers usually don't grow as fast in the fall and aren't even close to full size by the time we have our first freeze, so I usually don't pull them and hang them in the garage because the fruit are too small to bother with.

Dawn