Pruning chili plants 101: Is it necessary?

Pruning your peppers. It's a topic that seems to get a lot of debate in the gardening world. There's a sort of mystique around whether you should or shouldn't prune them. Or in the pepper world, it's often called topping your peppers. So let's figure it out. Why should you prune them? When should you not? And really what's the purpose of pruning in general? Kevin Espiritu here from Epic Gardening, where it's my goal to help you grow a greener thumb. Now I'm far from what you would call a pepper head. I've had people on my podcast before who've grown hundreds of different varieties of peppers. My friend Jason at Boheka Pepper Hut is a perfect example. So I am not the worldwide pepper expert, but certainly we can use some basic gardening principles to figure this out. So without further ado, cultivate that Like button for 20,000 Scoville units and let's get into the video. So let's take a look at the structure of the pepper plant. Here we have a shishito pepper. So first of all we have an offshoot of growth right here down near the bottom of the stem. And then we have another one right here, another offshoot. But it's pretty clear that this is our main stem. Nice and thick, really bushy. And we even have some additional offshoots right here and right here. So for the purposes of pruning, this one looks like it's already in a good spot. We have a nice amount of vegetation. It's really kind of setting up. You can even see additional offshoots forming right here. And so we don't really need to prune this one because it's already doing the job of pruning. Now let's go ahead and look at this jalapeno plant, which is already a pretty tall plant. So it's kind of a little past the point where you would do a prune, but let's just examine it for the sake of this video. First of all, it's the same size fruit relatively as the shishito pepper. So we can kind of analyze it from that perspective. You've got an offshoot coming out down here. You have another offshoot here and here. So basically anywhere that there's a leaf node, you have the potential to have similar to a tomato, kind of like a sucker-esque shoot coming out there. What I notice is it's just a little long. So if I wanted to give this a prune, I could in theory come right there, which I'm not going to right now. I'll prune another one later, but I could come right there, clip this growth off and we'd get growth out of here and out of here as the two new main stems. So we'd get a nice amount of bushiness coming out. Now, does that necessarily impact the amount of fruit and flower? It actually doesn't necessarily impact that. Sometimes it can increase it. Sometimes it can decrease it. It really is a factor of the length of your season. But the reason I'm not going to is because this is already a pretty well developed jalapeno. I've got some early flower buds up here. We have this nice Y split. And in fact, we have almost like one, two, three. And so I feel pretty comfortable with this. It's not tall enough that I think it's going to blow around in the wind too much. So I feel pretty good about it. So here we're looking at a more mature shishito pepper. You can see off of this small branch right here, we have a young fruit. It's probably ready to get picked. But what you notice that's most striking is you've got the main stem, you have a couple of random offshoots, but then you have this really hard Y fork and that's a really common growth pattern with peppers. You see them do this. When you top, what you're effectively doing is you're pushing that fork lower in the main stem. So you're causing it to bush out earlier in its vertical growth. That's why a lot of people do it. And with shishitos and other small peppers, I find it can be quite valuable. This one I just forgot to do or didn't do for some reason, but it can be very valuable because you get this nice bushy amount of growth, tons of vegetation, which puts out tons of small flowers, which then put out tons of fruit. Now, if you have a bigger fruit, like a big old bell pepper or banana pepper, sometimes it seems like topping kind of slows it down and doesn't really impact the fruit or the stability of the plant. And on these taller, larger sweet pepper style varieties, it seems to make sense to just let it grow. Now I probably wouldn't top this one, but just to show you how I would do it, here we go. So first of all, make sure you have some nice sharp snips or shears. I like a scissor over a knife because it's a lot easier to make a clean cut. So I'm going to go super low. I want to go probably, let's see, we've got an offshoot here. We've got a nice offshoot here. We've got a nice offshoot here. I think I'm going to top right about there. So you want to make a 45 degree cut or just any sort of angled cut, just like that. Boom. Right above a growth node. And of course, I missed one tiny fiber, but that's okay. So see what's going on here. We've left, we've left the leaf. We've left this budding node, which is the most likely one to become the dominant growth node. Then we have this one here. Actually this one might speed up because it's a little larger. But these are going to bush out and they're going to kind of go like that. And so now we have a little more compact plant that's going to really grow and bush out. A couple of things to keep in mind when you are deciding to top or not to top. One good reason to top would be if you grab your plants from a nursery, they're looking a little lanky and or you've started some seeds and they weren't grown in ideal conditions and they're just a little bit top heavy. Well, then it can be a really good idea, especially if you have a long growing season where damaging the plant, which is what a prune is actually doing and allows it to grow a lot more bushiness, which all these leaves are just little factories for photosynthesis. So if you have a nice long growing season, you can sacrifice a little time to eventually reap a larger harvest. Then it can be a really good idea. Again, it seems like on some of these larger peppers, this is kind of my row of bell peppers back here, I've opted not to top because it seems like it slows them down too much and it just doesn't seem like it does much. So what's the point of doing it if it doesn't do anything? But again, with gardening, it's all about experimentation. So if you want to try it, maybe just grow one shishito, top it, grow another, don't top it, or jalapenos, whatever your favorite pepper is and give that a try. But I hope this gave you a little bit of insight into the gardener's perspective on how to think about these things. And until next time, good luck in the garden. Keep on growing.