My Pepper Growing Secrets For Huge Harvests

I've grown over 80 different types of peppers in my 10 plus years gardening. And in this video, I'm going to share with you the most impactful things you need to know to maximize your pepper harvest. So cultivate that Like button, and I will personally bestow upon you 25% heavier fruit set. And let's get into the first tip, which is actually one of the more controversial pepper techniques out there. With many of our classic summer crops, they would benefit from some type of pruning. Take this tomato, this is a San Marzano that actually is last year's seed that dropped to the floor and started growing in the ground. And you can see I haven't pruned it at all. This probably would have benefited from me coming in and giving it a clip. So what about peppers and why is this pruning technique so controversial? Well, first of all, I'm talking about something called topping, which is an interesting phrase for just pruning off the top growth of a pepper, somewhere around this point, a little bit younger in its life, so that it branches and it's a lot bushier. Similar to how you might prune a basil plant to make it bush out. And the theory is then that it's going to bush out, produce more leaves, produce more fruit. Thus you will get more peppers. Now, what I'll say is I generally do not recommend topping. And I'll tell you why. Number one, if you are in a short growing season, zones three, four, five, six, you don't have a lot of time for that pepper to recover from that pruning activity and put out a lot of fruit. I say, get your transplant in and let it ride. The only pruning I might do in that situation is coming down and just removing a low leaf that is touching the ground so you stave off any disease. Another reason I don't recommend topping is if you're growing larger peppers, bell pepper, Anaheim chili, they don't produce a whole lot per plant. You're going to slow them way down. Just let that plant rip. Don't top it. Now, the one case that I think might make some sense is if you're growing a small pepper, like a shishito or a bikini pepper and you have a long growing season and you top the plant nice and early. That would mean that roughly when it's about this height or so, you'll see on a pepper plant a little bit of like a Y fork and you can top it at that point and then it will bush out and you have such a long growing season, it'll recover from that and throw out a ton of peppers. But I'll tell you this guys, I didn't top any of my peppers last year and I had a bumper crop. So for me, don't worry so much about topping, but there is something that you should worry about. With peppers, as with many plants that grow upright, but then put on a lot of fruit that can get kind of heavy, if you have any winds blowing through the area or if maybe just it's a heavy fruiting year for that plant, you can become depressed very quickly when you realize you have snapped the main stem and that plant is no more, which is why the next thing I almost always do with my peppers, especially when I'm growing a bigger variety, is I use a simple stake. Now you can have a cage. There's a smaller pepper cage. We're actually going to offer one pretty soon on our store. But in the meantime, just use a bamboo stake, get them really cheap. You can cut them into different pieces or sizes. And I like to come in, usually when this plant's a little bit smaller, to be honest with you, but it's okay at this point to come in right near that base and just jam this in, maybe like six to eight inches or so. I use just a simple bit of twine. And all this does is it makes sure that this plant is not going to get damaged from the wind. Now, which I do have some coastal winds that kind of blow through my garden. I don't know about you, if you are watching what kind of winds you are dealing with. But for me I like to come in and just tie a main stem or two into the stake, just like this. Not too tight because then you risk the wind kind of rustling against the tie and it'll actually degrade the flesh on that stem and it could cause some disease problems. But just a loose tie here. But you don't have to go crazy. A simple stake, simple twine will keep your peppers upright, protected from the wind and make sure they don't buckle under the weight of their own success. But in this pepper garden, I may have already made a mistake. And if you're a beginner pepper gardener, there's a very common misconception with mixing peppers in the garden. I have a mix right here of hot peppers and sweet peppers and it's often recommended, hey, don't put those together because then the hots are going to become sweet and the sweets are going to become hot. And in a sense, if you're thinking that right now, you are technically correct, but you're correct for the next generation. Because what happens is cross-pollination will happen in this patch. The shishitos, the bells, the sweets, they'll all cross-pollinate, of course. But the seeds are what are going to be the hybrids. The plant as it's grown, it's the genetics of the shishito that are going to produce the shishito. It's not going to impact the flavor of this year's crop. So do not be afraid to mix your hots and sweets together. Especially if you're in a small space, growing in a compact way and not feeling like you have to separate all your peppers out will help you maximize your yields. While you don't have to worry about mixing your hot and sweet peppers, you do have to worry about actually something that's hitting me in the face right now. That would be the beautiful sunlight causing sun scald on your peppers. So what'll show up is like a little brown, almost like dry or desiccated look on the pepper. If that's an unripe pepper, not really mature, I'd cut it off, sacrifice it, throw it in the compost. If it's a mature pepper, I would harvest it, cut that part out and use it. But why not just prevent it? So there's three ways you can do it. Number one, take a look at what I've done here. We have peppers planted relatively densely. I would say anywhere from 10 to 12 inches apart. There's ones in the middle, they're just a little bit slower. But normally you'd have this nice canopy where each pepper protects the other peppers and gives a little bit of a cover. Another thing you can do is with plants around the pepper bed. So take a look at these sunflowers. The sun's over this way. The sun is trying to get through. It's not succeeding because the sunflowers are blocking it a little bit. And it does provide a bit of a dappled shade on the pepper bed, which just protects them that little bit, especially in that afternoon sun. The final thing is at my feet, this big old honking mess. And this is shade cloth. I haven't cut it down to size, but just to show you if I was to hold this up and block the pepper bed off, take a look at this plant right here. I've cut about 50% of the light, but the pepper is still getting enough to grow and thrive. And so the way you would apply this to the bed is you could put some stakes up, bamboo would be totally fine. You could do some hoops, cut it to size and just drape it over during the hottest parts of the day. And that my friends is how you deal with the dreaded sun scald. But it does not fix the fact that your pepper plants when they're producing need to be watered perfectly. Peppers and water, when they are pumping, it is crucial that you water them properly. And there's two main ways I see a lot of growers go wrong. Most people aren't underwatering their pepper. Remember, tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants all in the same family. Tomatoes need a lot more water than peppers. They're going to be putting out way more leaves. And also pepper leaves are a little more waxier. They sort of retain water a little bit better than a tomato leaf. So you don't need to water these as much. If you're going to hand water, I highly recommend just coming in and hitting at the base just like this. But you can tell I have a drip irrigation system set up that I just run in my birdies raised bed. That's been my personal lifesaver. I consider drip irrigation the bare minimum. So I set those up so they water at least as much as the plant needs. And then I can come in and troubleshoot if it needs even more. Now here are the two ways you're going to go wrong when you're watering your peppers in the season. Most of us know, okay, well when a plant's leaves droop, that means it's thirsty, it needs more water. Well, it's actually not true. A plant's leaves can droop for two other reasons. Number one, too much water. Too much water actually prevents the plant from functioning properly and you'll see it start to droop as a response. And then if you water even more, that plant is dead. Sayonara. The second reason is in extreme heat. Think of like a pumpkin, right? When pumpkin leaves are hit in the middle of the day by sunlight and heat, they tend to kind of droop and you think they're dead. But no, as soon as it gets to be early evening, they just pop right back up. And the same with peppers. So the way to know is classic. It's to come in, move your mulch aside and then just check and see how much you're watering. I'm in a good spot here and also the pepper leaves look really good. So that's the way to deal with watering. It sounds elementary, but you really can go wrong here. But what about food? Now, to be clear, you don't have to feed your peppers, but this is a video about maximizing your pepper harvest. So in that case, you may actually want to. What I do is I will put some in the planting hole, of course, at transplant time. But if I see a pepper somewhere around this point, I start to see some flowers forming, it's sizing up nicely. I'll just take a scoop and I go just by hand of organic granular fertilizer, not high in nitrogen. So this one here is a 493 fruit and flower. You do not want to put a lot of nitrogen in when it's forming those flowers. So I just kind of scratch this in. I'll cover the mulch back up. And then importantly, I will give it a bit of a water in. Maybe once a month you can put this much in. It's not a crazy tip, but it does provide a little extra nutrition. Now if you're more of a no-dig style gardener or you feel like the soil has plenty of nutrition, definitely skip this one. There's no point in learning how to maximize growing these delicious and beautiful plants unless you know how to harvest them correctly. And there's a lot of different ways you can do it. Take something like a bell pepper. There's a green bell pepper, there's a yellow, orange, and red bell pepper. Well, surprise, surprise a green bell pepper is really just the unripe version of all of those other colors. That's why at a grocery store, you'll see green bell peppers typically a little bit cheaper than an orange, yellow, or red. Cause it's taken less long to get them to that state. So you could harvest your bells a little bit early, take a couple of greens off and then let the rest mature. That'll free some energy up for the plant to produce perhaps a few more peppers throughout the season. And then take something like a jalapeno. You can of course harvest that as a green jalapeno like we're very used to. But if you let it go red and start to crack or cork a little bit, you'll actually have a very common way to eat jalapenos in Mexican culture. And if you take it a step further and smoke it, well you have a word that no one over 50 knows how to say. Chipotle, chipotle. Chipotle peppers is how you make those. It's actually just a jalapeno pepper that's been matured and smoked. So a few different fun ways to harvest these peppers, but we are still talking about maximizing them. And there is no better way to maximize a pepper garden than growing the exact same pepper garden next year from the exact same plants by overwintering, which is what this video here will teach you how to do. Good luck in the garden and keep on growing.