10 PEPPER MISTAKES Will DESTROY Your Harvest 🌶️💀

through the years I've somehow made every care mistake there is to make with these plants so today I want to share with you the Big Ten you need to avoid in a rapid fire so that in no time at all you'll know just what not to do in order to get an amazing pepper Harvest this year let's get started [Music] on this channel I have always advocated against topping your pepper plants right that practice where you go in here you kind of find a y branch on that plant and you remove all of the foliage all of the growth above that y branch in order to promote bushiness with the idea that that's going to in turn increase your overall yields for the season and the big reason I advocate against it is there's just not a lot of evidence that it works that it improves yields but the other thing we know that it does do is push back the timeline for that pepper plant in terms of production pretty significantly and for me with these Peppers right I don't want to push back that timeline any further than it already is you can see very few of these have even started changing colors yet and none of them are truly ripe and we are already eating giant beef steak tomatoes at this point these have been ripe for weeks if not already a month so with these peppers I don't want that Harvest to be any slower than it already is timeline aside the other problem with topping your pepper plant is that if you aren't careful about the timing and the care after you do that topping and your Technique you're going to end up with a plant that simply does doesn't have enough canopy and you can imagine if just all of these leaves were suddenly gone in order to protect the fruit that it's producing and in order to protect the stem from the Sun and in turn that's going to make this next mistake all the more likely to happen peppers like these are pretty much always considered a full sun plant right and that's kind of mostly correct but if you live somewhere really hot like I do with days that regularly get into the triple digits High UV index you might find that your plants are getting a little bit sunburned specifically these early fruits this right here is called Sun scald it's not the end of the world most of these are still going to be mostly edible we'll just kind of cut off the affected bits and eat the rest of it and you can see that because my plants are a little bit stunted from our Cold Spring of this year they're not as big as they should be typically they would be providing each other a little bit more shade they'd be kind of touching with the canopies they'd be a little bit bigger and bushier and that would be really helping out these lower fruits for what it's worth though Sun scalding tends to be a bigger issue with that initial early fruit set this one actually just came off a plant that is a little bit younger and was just starting to set fruit and you can see it's pretty badly scalded and then as that canopy gets bigger and the plant gets a little bit more mature the sun's holding just sort of becomes less of an issue and then in general hot peppers are just more resilient against Sun scalding period [Music] so look I love me a good jalapeno I love me a good bell pepper obviously but I would recommend not growing those things or if you really enjoy them grow them in addition to something else and don't constrain yourself to those familiar grocery store favorites see the varieties that are grown for sale at a grocery store or constrained by a bunch of characteristics that we as home gardeners we just don't have to care about how well they transport in a truck how good they look sitting on a shelf how perfect their skin is how enormous they are as a fruit for whatever reason consumers we really like giant Peppers we don't have to care about those things at home we just have to care about how well they grow and how good they taste ultimately my advice here is just have fun choose a few new varieties if you'd like a quick little recommendation I love these pasilla bajio peppers for making into sauces and I always love these Jimmy nardello grilling Peppers to throw on their barbecue so delicious and then these super ties right here are just absolutely phenomenal in a curry thank you so if you take a look at this plant you might notice there's not a whole lot of new fruit set going on we've got some down here closer to the bottom but these new flowers are not doing a very good job of turning into fruits and the reason for that is we've had back to back heat waves that are absolutely destroying this plant's ability to set fruit to properly pollinate and actually this isn't the mistake that is not really a problem it's just the reality of growing peppers in the summer in hot climates the mistake is trying to fix that Blossom drop with ineffective remedies things like putting antacids into the soil or burning your plants with strong fertilizers when those things aren't going to force them into production they're just going to harm the soil and harm the plant truth is if you live somewhere hot your peppers are just going to struggle to set fruit during those hot periods of Summer unless you want to put some shake off over them that actually works pretty well too anyhow no need to panic even though the top of this plant is totally bare of fruit it will get back into the swing of things and start setting again once our temperatures subside a little bit foreign ly heat isn't not what is causing these two plants to set so little fruit you didn't think I was going to ignore the fact that these two big healthy plants only have a one pepper between them right so what is happening here is I mistakenly grew these at the back of our toddler container garden and they simply they aren't receiving enough sunlight in order to turn these blossoms into fruit in order to set fruit and the solution because this is growing in a bag right is pretty simple I just need to push this into an area of the garden that gets at least six hours of direct sunlight or if you're just dealing with shadier spots and you don't have a full sun location try growing a smaller hot chili something like a bird's eye chili or a Thai Chili this is that super Thai variety these in my experience just do a better job of setting fruit kind of regardless of the conditions that are in low light too much shade too much heat too much sun they are just good at setting fruit and lots of it now one thing we definitely did do right was planting these Peppers nice and dense these are all at about 12 inches apart which is just perfect helps us get a lot of food out of this area earlier on when we talked about Sun scalding that was the first reason that I like to plant my pepper so close together when they have those canopies they're all kind of touching each other they do a good job of providing a little bit of shade to those early fruit sets and they just reduce the amount of sun scalding that you have to deal with but the bigger reason is kind of the more obvious one when you plant your peppers close together you can fit more peppers in the same space and you get a bigger Harvest at the end of the day if you can plant it about 12 inches apart assuming they have plenty of compost plenty of fertilizer you're going to get a bigger Harvest than if you plant it at two to three feet apart which was sort of the traditional guideline [Music] at this point we've talked a lot about the mistakes the things that can go wrong during the growing season but with peppers a lot of the issues actually pop up before we ever transplant them into the ground that's what I want to end with here four things to watch out for four mistakes that you can make while those peppers are still baby seedlings walk into the Garden area of any Big Box store in Spring and you're going to find yourself tomato seedlings and pepper seedlings put out and sold at the same time and while that seems like a pretty innocuous decision it's actually kind of problematic because pepper seedlings need much warmer nights in order to thrive than tomato seedlings do in fact we really want to wait for overnight temperatures to stop going below 60 degrees Fahrenheit before we put out those pepper seedlings or 55 degrees absolute minimum and I'll put the Celsius conversion down there and compounding that little discrepancy between peppers and tomatoes is the fact that peppers can unlike Tomatoes they do not bounce back well from cold chalk they do not bounce back well from being planted out too early and I know this from personal experience and there's also evidence to show this but I know this from personal experience because this year spring night's just absolutely refused to warm up and unfortunately due to just some light circumstances I had to plant out my Peppers too early when nighttime temperatures were still in the low 50s and this right here unfortunately is kind of what we ended up with stunted burned plants because of all of those Cold Cold Spring nights they just weren't able to grow large enough and protect themselves and the problem is kind of more acutely obvious when you compare them to the giant wall of tomatoes that have been hugely productive and are just growing really really beautifully right next to those peppers [Music] pepper plants in general throughout their life cycle are just generally less thirsty plants than most of the other nightshades but in no point in their life cycle is that more apparent than during the seedling phase and over watering during the seedling phase causes two very very common complaints with peppers the first is unfortunately very sad and irreversible they simply fall over and die due to damping off due to a fungal issue with too much water in the soil the second is a little bit more subtle pepper seedlings that are grown in waterlogged soil have a hard time growing robust strong deep root systems so what happens is when you go to transplant them out you'll find that the roots are barely keeping them in the soil and they're really concentrated in the top layers of that soil and those plants are never going to grow as strong as big as productive as plants with good root systems luckily the solution is fairly simple just wait until that top layer of soil is really truly dry before Watering your pepper seedlings again but in general pepper seedlings simply don't need as much water as a often as a lot of the other seedlings that you're going to be growing indoors so one tip on this is to make sure that you are growing your peppers in separate containers in a separate tray from your other Nightshade so that you don't have to try and balance the amount of water that those different plants receive [Music] another way that pepper seedlings can be a little bit dramatic is they really don't like to have too much bottom heat after germination Peppers unfortunately have sort of a narrow band of temperatures they like to grow at when they're really young they prefer it to be at about 70 degrees Fahrenheit during the day and about 60 degrees Fahrenheit at night luckily solution here is very simple monitor your temperatures outdoors and indoors and turn off those seedling heat mats before they cook the roots of your pepper seedlings out of all the nightshades that we grow peppers eggplants Tomatoes tamarillos tomatillos ground cherries others right Peppers tend to be the most dramatic about the hardening off phase and all I mean by that is they tend to get a little bit cooked a little bit faster than those other nightshades when you bring them outside to start getting used to the sunlight and the temperatures Outdoors after growing them inside for months at a time so the solution in my experience is fairly simple just provide your peppers an extra week of hardening off if you can if you can manage the patients for it so they get a really slow gradual adjustment to the conditions outdoors and have a better chance of success when you actually transplant them into the ground the nice thing is this typically isn't too onerous because you have to plant out those Peppers later than you plant out the tomatoes anyways all right y'all that is it for today 10 mistakes to make with pepper plants that if you can avoid are going to absolutely supersize your Harvest I hope you had fun with this one today and I hope to see you on the next one until next time happy gardening

Channel: Nextdoor Homestead

Views: 8,690

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Id: YOQD-H1dO6o

Length: 11min 26sec (686 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 05 2023