HELP! My pepper plants have fallen over

[NaturalJoy]

I was under the impression that pepper plants didn't require staking. Mine are around 1.5 ft tall and quite heavy with fruit...and laying completely down on the ground. The peppers aren't quite ready to be picked, there's just a lot of them, and it's been windy. Did I not plant them deep enough? What can I do at this point?

Thanks!

[karenpl]

My pepper plants are still pretty small, but my tomato plants fell over last night when it stormed! I went out today, got stakes, and got most of them up again. I built a kind of tripod around them, 3 stakes in the ground, bound together close to the top. Then tied the plants to the stakes at strategic places.

I don't think the toppling over has harmed them much, although only time will tell.

I have used the tomato cages you can get, but somehow my tomatoes usually manage to topple over the cages in addition to themselves! Hope the tripod stakes will work out better.

It took ages to pay for those stakes, the register kept deciding on other totals and they kept redoing it, only to get yet a different answer. Was interesting to have my six hungry kids there, trying not to hit each other with the stakes (not always successfully LOL), and I was just hoping that they would HURRY so we could go home and have lunch! :-)