Forest Notes: Staking and Pruning Peppers

hey guys Veronica here so I've been getting a lot of questions about midseason pruning specifically is it too late for me to prune should I prune at some point I don't know what I'm doing with my peppers so I just wanted to cover some of these questions and go over various methods and techniques that I think could potentially apply or be adapted depending on where you live one of the things you really need to think about and keep in mind when you're deciding to prune in the middle of the summer is how many more days do you have that are frost free because your first frost is going to determine if you're able to get another harvest off your plants or finish the harvest that is currently in process so we're gonna go over all of that so the first thing that I want to show you is I finally managed to plant two of the same plants side-by-side I had picked out some Serrano's at the nursery earlier this year and wanted to do this side-by-side comparison because it's something I get asked a lot like does pruning even matter that much and I honestly think it does but I'll show you and you can decide you know if it's something you want to incorporate in your gardening practices or not so here on this pepper that's closer to me is the plant that I pruned earlier in the season and as you can see it has a lot of foliage it's really leafing out it's starting to develop a lot of serrano peppers and the stem portion of it is probably about three quarters of an inch in diameter half an inch to three quarters of an inch so it's getting good stocky bass it's also starting to fall over because the peppers are a little heavy on top and I didn't go back through and continue pruning or training it at all so a lot of this space has been hands-off because I've been very focused on the field and the forest and this was sort of just you know nice little normal garden with compost and mulch and whatnot to have some peppers and tomatoes this summer but this guy is branching out well and there's more flowers on the way and I really don't want to prune it at this point because it's just starting to become really affective so with this guy what we're gonna do is stake it instead now the one that's a little further away from me and I'll pull this so you can see it you can see that this is the further away plant and while it's very upright the stem is actually about maybe a third to half the size of the stem on this one it had a few peppers on it when I first purchased it and for the sake of it being sort of a control plant I decided not to remove anything and we harvested those peppers and it's just starting to push a few more flowers but overall it's been kind of chilling and not productive in this space so my thought process on this is that because this one got cut back fairly severely early on it decided to push out more roots and try and push more fruit because the whole goal of most of the vegetables we grow is to reproduce and die and since it wasn't allowed to reproduce based on the flowers and fruit that were on it when I planted it it decided to you know really like go big or go home which is exactly what it's doing whereas this guy already had some peppers growing earlier in the season so it just was able to chill because it's like I got my seats covered like we're good we're just gonna hang out here so on that one we're gonna do some pruning but first I want to show you how I stake these guys if I'm not going to prune them and I really want the flowers and fruit that are on it to continue developing there's no wrong answer here as far as which method you choose it really is about just looking at your plant thinking about your season and how many days you have left in order for peppers to ripen and then going from there so I've got a couple of fruit would prunings if you watched my video on composting there's a lot of sticks that get set next to the compost bin because I'm stripping the leaves off these branches that I've pruned and then I'm not usually composting the branches because they take too long but if you get a nice long branches and you're pruning what you can do instead of spending you know Dollar pop on bamboo sticks at the big-box store is you can just hang onto those branches and then what I'll do is I will just shove them in around the plant and I'll start building a tripod and I do this instead of just putting one next to the plant and tying the plant because I find that this is a there's a lot less breakage that happens when it has support on multiple sides so especially if you're in a high wind area being able to support it almost like a tomato cage but without that additional expense and just like a very natural looking sort of thing in your garden so I'll try and push these kind of equal distance to make a little triangle shape and get them down in the ground pretty well you can use a tomato cage if you have one I just I don't have any here so I'll push those in and then I'll get my trusty dollar store wire you can get two packs of this for a buck it's kind of crazy but it comes with Spencer and cutter and everything so it's a nice thing to have around and if you're doing a lot of trellising and training and then I just tie these together right here at the top you can use string you can use dental floss you can use the twist you offer bread bags like I just like my little wire dispenser it's the only thing in this whole operation right here that's not just not compostable so I'll pull those off off and at the end of the season and use them again but and that's basically it for the for the little cage that I build for these guys so that should keep this guy upright and from falling over too much I may come in and like weave these branches to support them as I watch how the wind blows and finish to keep it from falling over too much for the duration of the season and then I may come back in here later and you know prune out a couple of branches to try and push another flush off of it as they break pieces so that one will come up if you have stuff that breaks just prune it because you don't want those broken pieces just chilling but don't lose too much so we're good and so this guy now you can see if the wind blows it it's going to stay upright and it's not going to be an entire host like if you just put one with it and then tie it a lot of times what happens is that will get blown over with it unless you're really staking it deep down in the ground and then you may be damaging the roots in the process so highly recommend building them a little tripod like this because that just seems to be a much sturdier cage for them now what if you don't want to stake them what if you're looking to get more production you've already harvested a large crop and you want a bumper crop and they're not doing anything and they're just like kicking it in your garden and you're not really growing or producing for you that's when we bust out the pruners so and so now we're gonna move over to this other guy over here the one that was not pruned and we're gonna talk about pruning it so I learned a new term this week it's called rat tuning and I saw someone using it when it comes to vegetables which I thought was very interesting because I've always called midseason pruning for a bumper crop production which is a total mouthful so it's nice to have a terminology for it but it comes from the sugarcane industry and what they do is they'll basically go through and they harvest and they'll cut the sugarcane at or just above the soil line and leave the roots in the ground and what happens is more canes will push through the ground and then they're able to get maybe a second or even third harvest off of that now we're not gonna cut this pepper all the way to the ground because that's just not a prudent decision when you have a plant that you know only has a few more months to produce and needs to photosynthesize and it is much wiser to cut it six to eight inches above the ground which is what I generally do when I'm cutting back peppers at this point in the season now why would you cut back peppers at this point in the season say you've already got a full harvest off of it and it's starting to slow down you're not seeing a lot of flowers or buds forming maybe you have just a lazy plant like this guy you're not lazy I'm just kidding but maybe it's like just chilling and it's happy chilling and you need to you know give it a little bit of stress in order to make it more productive and maybe it's starting to you know get very tall and gangly and so there's all of these different reasons when you're looking at your plants and assessing them and trying to if you should prune them or not that you should keep in mind as well as how many days do you have until your first frost here we still have about three months so I'm not worried about them being able to be productive in that period of time because it's going to stay fairly warm up until that point at the beginning of November and then we'll get a cold snap but there should be enough frost-free days that are warm enough to still set more flower buds and still ripen the fruit in that period of time so if you were going through a heatwave right now if your plants are looking you know kind of like garbage because it's been so hot and you're seeing buds drop that's a perfect time to do this sort of pruning method and really let that plant build up more strength again at the root zone now you are gonna want to feed it but we're gonna get in here and we're gonna prune this guy so one of the things that I look for when I'm going to prune at this point in the season is their foliage down in the space where I'm pruning too I want to make sure that there's leaves left you want some people will say like two or three but honestly like keep a dozen or two at minimum leaves on that plant in order for it to be able to photosynthesize enough so that it can keep growing and potentially push a bumper crop before frost but I'll look at it I always want to keep it above the browner part of the stem so at some point in the season peppers usually get sort of this like bark almost like tree bark looking part and so okey I'll keep the cuts above that because I look to that as like the point of real strength and if I start cutting into that then I think this is gonna dry out too fast and you just you want to avoid as many problems and opportunities to kill your plants as possible so we're just going to do haircuts instead but I don't go you know try and cut it down to one main stem or anything like that like I'm really just looking at this from a shape perspective to try and get it to push out and then if it gets too dense in the middle from leaves because of that I may go in and thin it but it's not always necessary so it really is on a plant by plant basis but what I'm gonna do with this guy is I'll look and try and find you know two or three leaf nodes up each stem that I want to cut no I know I want to take the stem out that has the flowers because that's going to send a signal to the rest of the plant but there are no flowers on it and it really needs to you know get its butt in gear and start producing again if it's going to survive this season in the form of seeds so we'll cut this guy right here um yeah this is like the third note on this one so I'll take that one out immediately this one we're going to try and root because that's another thing you guys asked me so we're gonna hit that at the end of this video but that one comes out I may take this one I can see a new growth on on the backside and I like the way that the top is branching so what I'm going to do is just trim off the bits that are starting to bud which seems really counterintuitive but I want it to push flowers all over because something basically what I'm thinking is that the plant goes awesome things eating all of those like let's double down and go for broke and that's sort of the reaction that I want here so I'll trim off or pinch off a lot of the buds at this point and then just try and look for some amount of symmetry now there are other growers if you've had really big production or if your plant is you know really strong and healthy looking they will trim it down to just a central leader not a lot of foliage just leaving a few leaves here and there but I think that the more you can leave that's still really healthy the better because that planet's gonna recover a little more quickly so I will go in and cut I'm just gonna cut all of these like top buds off of not all of them but a lot of them and then I'm going to trim a little bit of stuff that's close to the soil line just because there's some concern about disease as the weather heats up although in here they're looking pretty good so that's basically it you could take more of it than that and then let's take that piece off too but you just want to do enough um cut back just enough to really let it kind of stress out a little but not too much so a little bit of healthy stress on these plants is not a bad thing I'm also looking you see me kind of poking at it as I'm working like I'm looking to see um sort of where the branches are positioned because that's going to determine you know how it grows out from there everywhere that you cut it's going to if you're cutting above a node then it's going to push out at that node if you're cutting below the node then it'll push out in the other direction I don't know if that actually makes sense but basically looking at the branching structure looking to see you know where is it crowding itself I'm gonna take this out so that's just not very even but that's pretty much it you could on this guy like I could take this pieces off and take those pieces off and take that off and like leave it fairly naked but I just I don't really like to do that to my plants I like to see them recover if I don't see buds in the next week or two I may go back and prune a little bit more off of it but it's not I'm not looking at doing like super hard prunings on a lot of these I'm just looking to see like what is the minimal amount that I can do in order to push some production so there's those guys now we're going to take this piece even though has flower buds and root it because that's the biggest stem that I have and we're gonna have to go to the woods to do that actually because that's where all of my ello is so we're gonna go to the nursery and I'm going to try a new method that I've been reading about and that there are quite a few cannabis growers that are very happy with it and so because they generally are leading the way in terms of gardening techniques I wanted to test it out so let's go to the woods so now I'm in the nursery because like I said that's where my aloe is hiding I haven't figured out all the spots I wanna plant this yet so I have a couple of pots in here I've been using a lot as far as seed starting and rooting cuttings and just general watering and maintenance and it's been pretty fantastic results to be honest so I wanted to try this out I've got the big branch that we cut off of that pepper plant just now and I'm going to pinch off basically all of these bits that have buds sometimes people cut leaves off too but I think that I'm mostly just gonna worry about flower buds this time and I'm gonna put this inside so that it has a good temperature to work with but what I'll do is I'll just take one of these aloe leaves usually the lowest one I'm gonna see if I can just pop it off versus cutting it yes and so I'll just pop it out of that plant and then I'm gonna take that next time it cut it across the top just to have a nice clean opening and then I'm gonna trim this again because it's been sitting drying out while we're chattering on about you know all of this stuff um I'm gonna get it a nice clean angle there at the base and then I'm just gonna stick it straight into this piece of aloe and like I said this was something that I've seen in a couple of the growing forums and I'm always looking to various growers to see what techniques they're doing but I thought this is really fascinating because it's just inundating this plant with enzymes and all kinds of good stuff plus the moisture that it needs to grow and it's in an antibacterial environment because of the aloe so we'll see what happens you know and if it works out or not but if you have any questions about the pruning process and anything else please leave them in the comments below if you are the sort of person that really wants to send a picture I have done this for friends but I'm opening it up to just like general public and you want to support me on patreon you can send me pictures and I will actually go through and circle the areas that I would recommend pruning in just basically any plant and kind of try and talk you through that process I am opening that up to all new patreon members for the rest of July so head over to patreon to UM join and sign up and add your support and get a little bit more help in this space if you like what you see please hit that subscribe button ding that Bell don't miss a single episode because I'm always trying to help you guys you know solve your problems in the garden there's lots of Q&A is that our going up here in the near future always answering questions on Instagram as well so if it's not a very specific question it's just a journal like I want to see this or that or you know how do you go about doing this or that then follow me on instagram at flavor kit and until next time happy gardening you

Channel: Veronica Flores

Views: 149,016

Rating: 4.901432 out of 5

Keywords: peppers, pepper pruning, diy trellis, diy plant support, staking peppers, pruning peppers, grow your own food, bumper crop, organic gardening

Id: M8DdugfYm38

Length: 18min 0sec (1080 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 20 2019