My pepper journey

Hello everyone, I'd like to just post up my journey as a beginner.
 
I started a garden this previous year, all outdoors, and had more tomatoes and cucumbers than I could even use. My bell peppers did awful, I think I got two or three tiny mutated looking peppers. Jalepenos did good as well as my little red mexican chilis (pretty sure thats the exact name that was on the seed labels.) Perhaps my proudest was my ghost pepper plant, which produced probably 60 pods.
 
Unfortunately, I thought I could harvest them early as the first frost was fast approaching, and hopefully they would ripen well like green tomatoes in the windowsill. Eventually they just turned mushy and nasty. Only a few actually turned red and the rest were lost. I chalk this up to being a beginner, and hopefully this post will bring me some insight on what I could be doing better.
 
Anyways, before I get much further I have gotten a lot of inspiration from YouTube, Khang Starr and Jeb the Gardener on YouTube are awesome channels I highly recommend checking out. Khang is mainly pepper videos and he does really awesome crossbreeding, Jeb is more around general garden stuff and uses the Kratky method for just about everything which has gotten me into Hydroponics!
 
Here are a few of my plants I am growing,
 

 

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I have no idea what happened to my reaper hook, it came up in my germ tray and when I checked the next day it didn't have any of its first leaves. Never seen that before.

 

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More pictures! Finally getting ready to put in the ground

 

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So I got the garden put in, just finished planting about 20 more peppers today, and I watered the new 20 with lake water.. That I JUST noticed the lake treatment flag is up.

Meaning the ones I watered today will likely die..

 

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A little update, the only casualty from the weed killer water was my giant tomato plant I grew all winter. But fortunately, as you will see in pictures, I left two suckers on the big stem of the tomato and to my amazement the plant is now growing again, it looks pretty funny but it's crazy how much abuse this tomato has been through.











This tomato is actually a branch I cut off my big plant earlier this year, I was able to get it to set roots and grow like a new plant.







And lastly the stem of the 7ft tomato I cut down with 2 suckers growing like nothing happened

 

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Just a quick pic more to follow later, just had to post this monster.

Look at the size of this beauty

 

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I need some guidance, it's still very early in the season and I've got a few plants that seem stalled out, not putting size on pods really or maturing. Should I harvest pods while they're still green or very small stuck at that size or should I wait? There's probably at least 3 to 4 months left of summer