Organic Pepper Production: Soil Preparation to Harvest

[Music] hi I'm Dara Wong one of the farm production managers here at the UCSC farm at the Center for agriculture and sustainable food systems today we're going to talk about transplanting peppers I'm going to show you some techniques and talk about why we do what we do so what I'd like to cover first is just a quick review of what we do to the field to get these pepper beds ready to transplant so we would start with a cover crop in the winter once the rains have kind of stopped around March or April and the soil is dried down to a workable moisture will mow that cover crop we'll go ahead and incorporate the material with our Spader so all the organic matter gets tucked into the field we would then wait ten to fourteen days for that material to break down afterwards we'd come back through and lift up our beds to make the peaked mounds after this step there's a really important step that we always like to highlight here at the farm which is pre irrigating those listed mounds what that looks like is putting out our raised aluminum pipe our overhead sprinklers onto our listed beds we put down about an inch to an inch and a half of water we wait again ten to fourteen days what that does is it establishes good moisture within the peaked mounds and it also gives us a flush of needs that will subsequently come back through and kill as a weed flush it has two main purposes for the bed preparation which is one establish good moisture in the soil profile and to germinate a generation of weeds that will kill before we even plant the crops so that we're essentially doing weeding before the plants are even in the ground the last step once we have the peak mounds that have been that I've had that we'd flush is to actually come back through and shape the beds and that's where we bring a steel essentially a steel pan over the lifted beds it just flattens out the surface so that you end up with what you see here which is a pretty nice flat bed surface with the soil just slightly compacted and tucked so that there's good soil contact so that the moisture can move evenly around the beds so before we actually transplant our crops into the bed and I show you our technique what I want to go over briefly is some of the key ideas around transplanting and what you're looking for in an ideal situation so the first thing I want to cover is moisture in the bed as I had said earlier we pre irrigate our beds so that there's plenty of moisture in the profile and what that will look like is if I dig my trowel into this bed and pull it up slowly you can see that there's dry soil on the surface where some of it is dried down but deeper into the bed there's really nice moisture that these transplants are going to get planted right into so ideal moisture is one of our key conditions for ideal transplanting the other thing is the kind of environmental conditions so right now it's pretty sunny but it's still early in the morning ideally I would call in an overcast day but I don't quite have that power yet so we'll deal with it as we can at least it's in the morning so the Sun isn't all the way the peak ideally you want to be transplanting in the morning or in the late afternoon but definitely not at midday the other thing is that there's no wind right now which is nice again when we'll increase evaporation and stress on the transplants as they get in the ground so no wind again early in the morning or late in the afternoon and ideally some Sun cover but of course you have to do deal with what you have so those are environmental conditions there's also the soil moisture conditions and then let's look actually at the transplants themselves so here we're actually going to be plant transplanting from two inch pots today sometimes growers will prick out their peppers into two inch pots sometimes into the seedling trays which you may have seen earlier in the videos but I'll demonstrate with the two inch pots today so what we're looking at here is a nice strong transplant when we actually look at the transplant itself coming out of the pot this is really ideally what we want to see and what that is is that you can see these kind of nice white roots at the edges of the pot so this transplant has been growing out but it's not quite root round in the pot itself so this is the perfect stage at which to put the transplant in the ground so that we can have minimum plant shock and these roots can keep extending out from the plug itself so now I'd like to go over the actual technique of transplanting so here again our transplants in the two inch pots so what I'll do is pull these transplants out and I'm going to lay out just two or three to demonstrate so again you see I'm being relatively gentle with these transplants because again there's a lot of loose soil around the the roots I don't want them to be too disturbed if you had a transplant that had a little bit more of root binding around the pot edges which again while not ideal is definitely okay you could drop these transplants a little bit more aggressively I'm also going to double check my spacing I want about twelve inches in between plants I know that this trowel is about ten inches so I'm just adding kind of two on and now comes the actual technique which when you're planting out a large field this can actually save you quite a bit of time so I'm going to show the technique again that we use here at the UCSC farm of course in whatever fields or farms you might be in there could be definitely different techniques this is one that we really like to use so we focus on a couple motions here for the transplant and we tend to like to use these sharp quarry horror type trowel because they dig into the soil very very easily creates less strain on your wrist and on your elbow if you're transplanting along 300-foot row so we get so what that looks like is that I plunge the Hori Hori into the ground and you'll see that I'm putting it at an angle slightly in front of where I actually want my plant to be I then position my plant behind the trowel so that as I pull back the hole that's created is filled in by the plant it's directly in line where I want it I'm holding my hand here to keep the position of the transplant while I pull the trowel out of the ground and then with a couple motions I fill the soil back and give a nice push with the hand so that again those roots from the transplant itself have now contacted that moist soil in the down in the beds so we're going to have a really nice healthy transplant so again I'll do it one more time on a slightly smaller plant if this is where I want my plant I'm putting my Hori Hori in at an angle in front plunging it into the ground I position my plant as I pull back I sneak the plant in and then with a little bit of soil and a nice tuck the last time again holding the plant put the trowel in as I pull back the plant tucks into place cover with soil and I push in so hi again I'm Daryl Wang the farm site and research lands manager here at cassis and we're back in the peppers now it's now harvest time we planted these peppers just as a refresher around June first it's now about August or October first so they've been in the ground about 90 days and you can see we've been harvesting off of some of these peppers and this particular variety were about to harvest so again just a refresher on what our steps were in terms of getting to this point in the peppers we did our normal bed preparation we pre irrigated that ground to get a weed flush before planting we went ahead and planted that ground watered in these peppers overhead for ten days did a single cultivation pass with the tractor switch to everything from overhead on to drip at ten days and ever since then these have been on drip irrigation on a regular schedule and then we probably came through with two to three hand weeding and that gets us to where we are today with a full block of peppers that's all ready to harvest so now that we're ready to harvest we're going to look a little bit more closely at the plant itself and the exact harvest technique so this variety here is Cyclon it's actually a hot pepper variety but you would harvest these hot peppers the same way you would harvest many sweet peppers so what you want to look at when you're looking at a pepper is having an understanding that as the pepper has grown up over time it's set fruit in successive waves so the first way will start lower down on the plant and that's where you'll have your ripe is fruit the second wave will be slightly higher and the third wave will be all the way at the top where you can see there's still some immature fruit so what we're really looking for at harvest stage again depending on your variety but for Cyclon in particular we're looking for a full red fruit that doesn't have any green on so you can see this is kind of green slowly going to read this here is a deep red and you can even tell the skin here is a little leathery it would be this was probably ideally harvested maybe two weeks ago and this here is kind of at our perfect harvest stage where it's a full red you can see the skin is nice and plump and full and this is really what we're looking for these peppers are actually all going to be going into a value-added process for us most will be smoked so this type of leathery appearance on the pepper is really not a big deal for our harvest so when we actually get into the harvest itself if you'll notice all of these peppers are set right at the forking of the branches of this pepper plant and that's where the plant sends up its flowers and hence where its fruit comes from so when we actually look for the fruit that we want to harvest you can see the pepper comes directly from that little joint and I'm going to try to grab as close to that joint as possible and pull it backwards against the angle that the stem is coming off so if I pull it backwards against that angle the pepper should snap off really nicely in my hand in doing so I'm not stressing this branch at all and I'm not breaking that branch down especially if you have successive waves of peppers on that branch you don't want to knock this branch off where the harvest is happening but let me show you that a second time again I'm identifying my pepper nice full plump skin fully red fruit identifying the the joint where the stem comes out and I'm going to pull back against the angle of the stem and should snap right off so to see that a little bit faster you can see that there shouldn't be a lot of time or energy wasted and picking this fruit and then our actual standard procedure for this is to use a five-gallon bucket that we have side by side so these peppers will just get put right into the bucket and that's our harvest so now to take a look at the harvest on a different variety this is a variety called Tiburon Tiburon is an ancho type pepper so the type of pepper that you would use for a chile relleno or something like that and this pepper very similar to the cyclone it's just bigger and all we're looking for and this is kind of a full we're looking for the size of the pepper for you know a deep green and and again you can see that we've harvested this pepper these peppers in waves already so we're now onto a second or third wave of peppers higher up on the plant and again I'm going to look for that same angle of stem coming from the branching I'm going to pull this away from that angle so you see it snaps off really nicely and then I'll just put it into my five-gallon bucket again same thing here looking for nice sizing a nice deep green and again I'll just take that stem bend it backwards and it should snap right off and we find that just using our hands stopping the peppers off leaving a nice long stem is a lot faster for us and actually coming through and using cell COEs or some type of clipper to actually clip the peppers off the plant so after harvesting the crop one of the nice things about peppers is that the post-harvest handling is very very minimal if we do a good job of ticking the peppers and having them lend directly into clean bucket then there's no additional cleaning that's necessary no additional washing that's necessary and actually we really like to keep water off the peppers so that they'll stay fresher longer from here they get weighed out into crates or into buckets then they can hit the cooler right away and we'll go ahead and keep those depending on the variety they can stay in the cooler for you know a week maybe ten days and we have plenty of time to sell that product so finishing this pepper crop we finished it much of the way we would finish all of our crops here on the farm we'll go ahead and mow this crop out so mow it with about six inches of stubble will lift the drip tape then we'll disc the entire field just one time and then would be ready for cover cropping and that'll take us full cycle the cover crop will be in the ground through the winter and we'll be ready to incorporate for next spring's crop [Music] you

Channel: Center for Agroecology & Sustainable Food Systems

Views: 119,896

Rating: 4.8219461 out of 5

Keywords: organic farming, organic peppers

Id: V4axHr1VNM8

Length: 13min 49sec (829 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 22 2017