Should be an interesting experiment! Keep us posted.

I think just the change in pot size will do wonders. In fact, I would keep a smaller potted plant outdoors as well. Then you have isolated one variable...pot size. If the plants do well downstairs, you won't know if it was the smaller pot or the downstairs environment that made the difference.

This year I tried smaller pots as well for the smaller plants. Those smaller plants did not go straight into 3-4 gallon size pots....they went into 1.5 to 2 gallon pots. There is just too much cold, wet soil for many of the plants in early spring. I am getting rid of this issue by using smaller pots!

Fair enough, using different pots sizes definitely introduces an uncontrolled variable, but there are so many other uncontrolled variables that it's really just a fun experiment anyway.

Last year we had a hot July, August, Sept. (for here anyway), and in those same 5-6 gallon pots I was sometimes having to water every day. So going to small pots just doesn't seem feasible, since they'd dry out so quickly on a hot day that I couldn't leave them alone for a weekend, maybe not even for a day. But in the basement under lights, with no wind and moderate temperatures, I figure the small pots could easily go a weekend without water and be just fine. So I guess it's kind of a test of what would work that would still allow me to go away for a few days and not risk having dead plants -- big pots outdoors with 2 plants each, or small pots indoors in the basement with 1 plant each.

I think they'll do much better now.
I bumped my plants up too soon this Spring, and although we've had unusually warm temps, the ground and the container mix was still slow to warm. My superhots were lagging in their #5 pots, whereas another C. chinense (started a month later than the others) that I'd kept in a 1/2 gallon pot has completely outgrown the pack. The issue now is keeping the plant from wilting when the sun hits the container directly. Time to move it up...but I'm still thinking that a #2 pot might be better than a #5.

Josh

It may be a photo artifact, but aren't those later shots showing yellow veins?

That's very observant of you, but no it must just be the way the sun played off the leaves. They are pale green, and the color is uniform across the entire leaf and veins.

My money's on the outdoor plants.
Shop lights are fine for seedlings but can't compare to sunshine for producing fruit.

Robeb, it will be interesting. Might depend on the variety, and I've never grown Matchbox under lights before. But this Thai Sun I grew entirely under the same shop-light setup a couple winters ago, so there is some hope for the indoor option...

Quick update... it's been 8 or 9 days since tranplanting a couple of the outdoor peppers and bringing them indoors. The leaves on the indoor plants have gotten much darker green since I brought them in. But I also seem to have brought in fungus gnats, so treated the soil for that a couple days ago.

The outdoor plants now look even more pathetic than in the pics above. The rain continued -- we got almost 2" on Tuesday alone. But today was sunny and a bit above average temps, and that is a trend that is supposed to continue for the next week or two, reaching 33C (91F) early next week.

So how the outdoor plants respond to this coming heat wave should make an interesting comparison with the basement grow-light plants.

thanks for the update!

we keep getting rain, rain, and more rain. the outside peppers are holding on, the ones in larger containers I can tell are not quite as happy.

I have a number in the greenhouse, and they seem to be doing the best. I have the moisture control and they get the sun.

Another update, July 13, or about 16 days after my last update...

Summer did finally come, with much less rain and temperatures as high as 93F (34C), which is very warm for these parts. The outdoor plants responded quickly -- they are a healthy green now and are flowering again, plus have maybe 10 peppers each per plant. That is far less than the advertised "100 or more" peppers per plant, but it is still early and they are recovering from an ugly rainy spring/early summer, so they still have time to impress, even if I'm not holding my breath on that front.

The indoor plants by comparison only have about 1 pepper per plant, so are far behind in that regard. But they have settled on a very different growth habit.... the outdoor plants are very compact and sturdy. The indoor plants don't have to deal with strong winds, thunderstorm hard rain, or the small hail that the outdoor plants experience, so are developing more spreading, weaker growth, and now have lots of flowers.

Not clear at this early stage (24 days) which method of growing will win, but right now the outdoor plants are definitely ahead.