4 Ways to Speed Up Pepper Growth & Fruiting

what is going on everyone welcome to another very exciting episode right here on the mi gardener channel in today's episode where we're talking all about how to increase the yields of your pepper plants get your plants growing being healthier and producing more fruit for you because i definitely have had this happen where you know you plant your pepper plants out and they only produce one pepper that entire year well if i would have known my plants would have only produced one pepper that year i would have just never planted them and just dedicated the space to something else that would have done better and so it can definitely be very discouraging to only have you know one or two fruits on a plant or to have the plants just not grow be very slow growing and like i said i can definitely relate so if you're going through that right now i share in that frustration but i've also found some ways to really give yourself a fighting chance the first thing that i would say is don't give up sometimes pepper plants because of just the type of plant that they are need a little more time to get going you know pepper plants are really hot weather plants they love very warm weather and so in early season we can be very discouraged by the fact that our plants aren't growing our plants aren't producing the plants just look kind of meh and weak and feeble and that's because they haven't kind of found their stride yet you really need to give your plants enough time to acclimate to the nice warm weather you need to allow the nights to warm up as well if your nights are still getting into like you know the low 50s high 40s that's just not warm enough for pepper plants to really thrive yes they're going to survive and they will grow but they're not going to grow very fast and any fruit that they do produce will be you know very few you're not going to get that many fruits in early season and so having kind of just a longer kind of a longer time horizon i guess you could say just having less initial expectations right off the bat is really going to set yourself up for not being discouraged but if you're getting into you know july and august and your plants are still really behind the ball what you can do are a few things let's go back to our garden here i've got a few pepper plants that are doing this right now and you can catch it early if you can catch some of these things early you can address them so that when you do get into july and august you're not really having these having these issues and your plants can be far better off when the weather is nice and warm you can actually be further ahead so the plants can actually start producing some fruits for you so the first thing you want to do is really assess the plant what you want to do is you want to look for fruit one of the things that that pepper plants will sometimes do in early season is they'll set fruit too soon you can see here these banana pepper plants there's no fruit on them they're beautiful they're absolutely just gorgeous they're not really focusing on fruiting they're focusing more on growing and then fruiting later we're starting to get some buds up top that's fantastic these are going to be loaded with fruit but compare that to over here we've got a few pepper plants that are just they're not getting with the program they have a beautiful bell pepper gorgeous little bell pepper but the plants are still super small what i'm going to do is i'm going to remove this this pepper i'm going to take that inside i can eat it you can eat peppers at any stage so don't worry you're not wasting this stuff but what you want to do is you want to focus the plant on growing by taking off this fruit it's actually going to prioritize in actually growing the plant rather than setting fruit and if it does start to flower i can even come back here and i can pick off some of the flowers to really make sure that for the first month to two months it's focusing on growing see over here look at this look at this little bell pepper plant it just does not know what's going on there's a bell pepper there and a bell pepper there the plant itself is only like five and a half inches tall it's just pathetic so i'm going to come in here i'm going to pull these peppers off and that way it's really going to focus energy on producing foliage what you'll notice is all these beautiful tall plants they have one thing in common they're all bell pepper plants but the ones that are taller are focusing on growing rather than setting fruit is there any question why the smallest plants have the most amount of fruit on them no fruit no fruit no fruit none of these have fruit on them and they're all twice as tall you know if not three times taller than these tiny plants here so this can happen and sometimes the plant can focus so much energy on fruiting that it really doesn't focus any energy at all on growing and then you lose out on the best time of the year to put on growth which is right now now i know the question is going to arise can i top my pepper plants now topping or pruning your pepper plants can be done but what we find is that in really short growing season areas like here in michigan it actually really limits the amount of fruit you're going to get yes you can top your plants and topping your plants will then reroute more energy to produce more side growth and more side growth will eventually mean more flowers and more flowers eventually will mean more fruit but that takes a lot of time i mean you're basically coming in and you're hacking off two or three weeks worth of growth maybe even more and then it's that much more time for the plant to regrow all that foliage all of that plant than to flower then to fruit here in michigan you might just sacrifice an entire month of your growing season just to get back to where you were and that does not necessarily translate to more fruit so in shorter growing season areas definitely not advised if you're someplace where you have a long growing season sure give it a shot it can definitely help and it certainly is not going to hurt because the plant is really just going to be more stable it's going to be able to yield more fruit but you have to have the growing season to justify it so that's kind of a maybe based on where you live the second way that you can really help to increase the production on your pepper plants is by fertilizing properly fertilizing at the right times of the year with the right type of fertilizer is going to make a big difference in the early season what you really want to focus on much like tomatoes is nitrogen so many people want to pump them with like a 10 10 10 or a 20 20 20. it's just not what you want to do because pepper plants they need lots of nitrogen to get the foliage in the plant grown up once the plant grows up then it can focus on flowering and fruiting flowering uses actually utilizes phosphorus and fruit yield actually utilizes potassium so phosphorus and potassium can use can be used later on in the season and is actually recommended for later on in the season if you want to have good fruit yield and fruit set so what i recommend doing right now is we use trifecta plus on our entire garden trifecta plus is kind of an outlier because it utilizes both fast acting and slow release ingredients so the fast acting nitrogen acts now the slow release phosphorus and potassium acts later it's just like i said very special in how it's blended but if you're not using trifecta you can use anything like blood meal use a fish fertilizer worm castings even are a great source of nitrogen alfalfa meal kelp meal all great sources of nitrogen to get your plant growing very strong first and then focus on phosphorus and potassium later things like bone meal is great rock phosphate fantastic you can even use things like green sand green sand has really good amounts of potassium you can also use things like wood ash wood ash has great sources of potassium just be careful not to use too much because it can swing the ph of your soil so be careful with that one but a great source of potassium for your soil even dried banana peels are another really good source of potassium for your garden they just take longer to break down so maybe consider adding them to your garden right now so that by the time they're broken down the plants can actually uptake them later in the growing season but banana peels are another really good option so just consider some of those things that the way you're fertilizing and what you're fertilizing with can make a big difference in just how the plant reacts and how much it produces and the final note to really increasing your your fruit yields on your peppers is monitoring your watering this is something a lot of people miss because they think pepper plants though they like to live in very arid hot climates that they don't need a whole lot of water couldn't be further from the truth the fruit is about 95 water and we've talked about this before that if you have something that's 95 percent water if the water is not available in the soil and you're just letting your pepper plants grow through the hottest driest part of summer and you're not supplementing with lots of water the flowers that they're going to produce are going to drop off the peppers they produce are going to form blossom end rot and that can actually cause the pepper plant to actually drop the peppers but also it might not even set the fruit at all water really helps to regulate the soil temperature and the ideal temperature of the soil is right around 90 85 to 90 degrees for you know for ideal pepper production and pepper growth but any hotter than that the peppers really start getting stressed 100 degrees 105 degrees the pepper plants might not set any fruit at all and also the fruit that does set is going to be very very small and very kind of woody and and tough because they need the water to actually get plump and to produce so if your pepper plants are getting into like july and august the hottest parts of the season and they're still not producing that many peppers check how much you're watering i typically give my pepper plants water if we're not getting any rain that is about once every other week so once every two weeks i'll come in and i'll deep water them i'll really give them a ton of water maybe about a gallon to a gallon and a half per plant and then i do that every two weeks so i'm not watering that frequently but i'm giving them lots of deep water that those roots are going to be able to tap into and produce fruit and that really helps them to not only expand their root system because it's encouraging the roots to move throughout the soil but they're also accessing that water and that water is going to help produce more fruit water is a huge kind of a huge regulator with how much fruit can be produced because the plant will not produce more fruit than it can sustain and so it's not going to spend that energy if the fruit can't be set so make sure you're watering on a regular basis make sure you're giving them lots of deep water make sure also that your plants are you know are just staying cool because uh if they're staying if they're getting too hot your plants are really not gonna like that either so i hope you guys enjoyed i hope you learned something new if you did make sure to throw a like up there make sure to subscribe if you're not yet already and as always this is luke from the mi gardener channel reminding you to grow big or go home and we'll catch you all later see ya bye

Channel: MIgardener

Views: 620,097

Rating: 4.9196815 out of 5

Keywords: Peppers, Premiere_Elements_2018, fruiting, growing, how to grow peppers, migardener, organic

Id: brzqCkiDc5Y

Length: 10min 36sec (636 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 16 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/ninjamom66]

Yeah I like Luke, watch a lot of his videos.