Pepper Growing Tips - Complete Gardening Guide on How to Grow Peppers // Grow More Peppers per Plant

one of my favorite things to grow in the summer garden are peppers now i'm not a super hot pepper fan but i do love sweet and smoky peppers and i love growing them the plants are beautiful when you see that fruit kind of starting to turn color and peek out from underneath the leaves it's so exciting in this video i'm going to go through the entire season for peppers and that is from seed to harvest how to successfully germinate the seeds because peppers can be a little bit tough with that and then growing them and going over the requirements pest and disease everything you need to know and did you know that peppers are a perennial and that you can actually grow peppers for several years without having to start all over again i'm going to go through all that and more and a bonus tip to show you how to get maybe three to four times the peppers from each plant coming up [Music] hey guys i'm brian from california garden tv and if you're looking to join an online gardening community that offers tips tricks and support to help you grow your very own organic fruits and vegetables then you've come to the right place get started now by hitting subscribe and make sure you hit the bell icon so you don't miss anything let's get growing so let's start at the beginning and that would be sowing the seeds now peppers take a while to germinate and they like warm soil 60 degrees soil now i don't know about where you live in my climate it takes a little bit of time to get to 60 degrees now probably not as much as those cold winter climates so if you live in an area that's got a short growing season or you are impatient you're going to want to start seeds indoors six to eight weeks before your last frost date and indoors meaning a greenhouse or under grow lights probably light from a window is not enough and we have a video that we did a couple months ago on a really cheap and easy grow light setup so i'll link that down below and you can check that out now it does take a while for the pepper seeds to germinate about two weeks or up to two weeks for sweet peppers and a month or more for hot peppers but i have a way that can shorten that time a little bit and actually increase the germination rate and i don't sew my seeds in potting mix or seed starter mix i actually sew them in a paper towel a wet paper towel and i will link a video below that i did last year on the details of that but basically you take a little bit of hydrogen peroxide into a bottle of water and then you wet a paper towel with that mixture and wring it out so it's just moist and you want to sprinkle the pepper seeds onto half of the paper towel and then fold it a couple of times so that it will fit into a ziploc bag now zip that ziploc bag shut and put it on a heat mat now heat mats are really affordable i'll link them below i think it's about 11 and i've had mine for i don't know almost 12 to 15 years and they just raised the temperature just a little bit now i have had people comment to say they burn their seedlings so i don't know what kind of grow mat you're using mine really only gets to about 75 degrees maybe there's some that you can adjust you want it around 60 to 75 degrees in about a week check on your seeds you're gonna have to undo it and unfold it very gently and in a week or so you should start seeing little sprouts coming out of the seeds now at that point you could very gently take these seeds the sprouted seeds off of the paper towel and just plant them just a little bit maybe an eighth of an inch to a quarter of an inch deep in a little six pack tray with some indoor potting mix or seed starter mix and they're not gonna look like this but a couple weeks after that then they will look like this they will start coming up you'll see the leaves at that point you know everything's been successful and you're going to take care of them then like a normal seedling once they get their first true set of leaves so the second set they get you can start a half strength fertilizer liquid fertilizer on them at this point you're going to want to put it under a grow light or if you're doing it in the greenhouse you just want that light source to be there then as soon as those sprouts break the surface of the soil once the weather starts to warm up and it's in the mid to upper 50s at night that's the low temperature they can be moved outdoors and planted into the garden after hardening off of course and i have a video on an easy way to do that i'll link that below as well now peppers are tropical plants and they do like warm weather but not too much sun six hours eight hours max is really all they can take and it's preferable to have morning and midday sun and then shaded in the afternoon and that's going to protect from sun scald which i'll talk about in a few minutes now peppers are related to tomatoes and you know what happens when tomatoes get too hot when temperatures go into the 90s tomatoes and peppers are going to drop their flowers which means they pause fruiting until the weather cools down again now you can kind of help this along by in the hottest part of the day or on the hottest days throw some shade cloth over your plants and that can inch them along unless it's you know getting into the upper 90s into the hundreds then you know you're just gonna have to keep them healthy and wait until the weather cools down now while they like warm weather they do still like their roots to be moist at all times so you wanna if you have drip great otherwise you want to use the finger test stick it about two inches into the soil if you feel moisture do not water if you feel dry then water pretty simple but i say that because even i have a tendency when the ground looks dry to just you know if you have the hose or you're doing something just water them a lot of times it's going to over water them because just under the top layer of soil it's moist it just looks dry on top you want to space peppers about 18 inches apart and they are heavy feeders so they need that full space to themselves to pull in as much nutrients as they can get so i'm going to be planting an entire bed that i have an entire raised bed with peppers but right now that raised bed is full of lettuce and cabbage and so it's just not ready to be planted in so these first ones that i have that are ready to plant which is a golden pepper it's a bell and poblano i'm going to be planting those into our container garden in pots and the smallest pot you're going to want to use for a pepper is this size here which is i think 5 gallons and that's again because peppers do need a good amount of space to develop a good root run that's going to pull in all those nutrients that they require now in preparing the hole for planting this is where they differ a little bit from their cousin the tomato they do not like to be planted deep they want to be planted at the exact same level that they were growing in the cup or whatever you have them growing in planting them too deep is actually going to stunt their growth rather than building a bigger root system to enhance their growth now also unlike tomatoes they react to nitrogen very well too well but they do it in in the form of a huge amount of growth but it's all leaves and stems and that's not what we want it's all it's all that greenery at the expense of fruit and in the end we want the fruit so i'm not going to be using the neptune's harvest crab and lobster and kelp like we did with the tomatoes because there's too much nitrogen in there you really want to be careful with the nitrogen and so i'm just going to be using the rock phosphate because that is all phosphorus the middle number on the bag of fertilizer is phosphorus the first number is nitrogen so we're going to give it a bunch of phosphorus in the beginning just because that doesn't move through the soil as well so a handful of rock phosphate in the hole now a lot of you commented asking if you could use super phosphate or triple phosphate um no not in the same way as rock phosphate rock phosphate's going to go in the hole at the root level it does not burn them it's all natural um the other two are synthetic and they will burn your plants so stay away from those we're planting it at the same level that it was planted at in the cup a handful of rock phosphate in the hole and then fill the hole in now throughout the season you're going to want to feed them every two to three weeks with a well-balanced fertilizer now i'm going to be using the the neptune's harvest tomato and vegetable this is a 2 4 2. so we don't want either one all the same number or you want the nitrogen to be low and either the middle number high or the second number high just don't want the nitrogen higher than the other two so a 242 is going to be fine you could do like a a 3 8 8 or anything that you want to use but make sure the the first number is lower than the other two now pepper plants get really top-heavy once they're loaded with all those fruits um so i stake my plant put the steak in right at planting time about a two foot steak out of the ground just to make sure it's got the the heft to handle the peppers and then i just tie it to the steak as it grows and then you can also use a small tomato cage that you can get from the garden center okay come here come here do you want to know how to get three to four times the peppers on one plant okay back up there's a pandemic going on and you're not even wearing a mask okay so like i mentioned before peppers like to put on a lot of vegetative growth at the expense of fruit now we're gonna cut back on the nitrogen that's going to help but we're also going to take the focus of the plant from here down to here what the and you can already see what's happening this pepper is wanting to put on all this growth toward the top it's focusing all the growth hormone into this tip here and what we need to do is remove the tip so that you can see in these little joints here the armpits as i call them on tomatoes you can see little tiny growth buds but they're just kind of laying there they're not doing anything because all the plants energy is at the top so as long as you have six to eight leaves besides the ones you're going to take off that will allow the plant to have enough leaves to still photosynthesize while it's building the bulk at the bottom so we're gonna make a nice sturdy stocky bushy plant rather than a tall spindly one that's also gonna make it more prone to falling over so we're going to take out that tip and that's going to push all that energy down into the plant to build out the the bottom of the plant rather than the top so keep them watered and well fed and there is nothing stopping you from a huge harvest well except for pests and diseases so let's go through a couple of those so the first pests i want to talk about are white fly now if you brush by your plants and you see tiny teeny little white moths flying everywhere that's white fly and what they do is they suck the sap out of your plant and eventually kill it or at the very least make it look really bad neem oil can actually help with that um you want to spray it every two weeks if you see the white flies around and that's going to that really will get rid of them the second one that's usually a problem for me is leaf miner now leaf miner it's actually the larval stage of several insects beetles moths and what it does is they lay their eggs inside the leaf and when the eggs hatch and the larva comes out it stays between the two upper and lower levels layers of the leaves outer layers and it just eats its way through and you'll notice little trails that you can't feel or anything these little white squiggly lines all over your leaves that's leaf miner now it can defoliate a plant if it gets bad neem oil will also help with it um but you it's really a good preventative so if you see some leaf miner on some leaves you can take off the affected leaves but they'll probably be back or spread and so you want to start that every two week regimen of the neem oil now i don't know any garden that doesn't have aphids if you don't have aphids good for you the rest of us do and aphids um they're sap suckers as well and they will really mess up your plants a really easy way to get rid of them sometimes is blasting them off with the hose just with a spray of water some of them will drown some will come back but if you keep doing that you might get rid of them neem oil definitely helps with aphids as well and ladybugs and parasitic wasps can also kill aphids now i've never had this happen but cutworms and even tomato worms can attack your peppers and if that's the case if you do see them you can hand remove them or you can use bt bt is a word i'm not going to pronounce but i'll put it on the screen and that is an organic method a really effective method of getting rid of any type of caterpillar type pests now in addition to pests there are a couple of things that can also happen that can ruin your crops um or at least cut them down drastically the first one is same as tomatoes blossom end rot and it's for the same reason a lack of uh uptake of calcium a lot of times there's enough calcium in the soil it just can't get to it usually it's a watering issue so water consistently make sure it's consistently moist if you do get blossom end rot then you can add some gypsum or some sort of calcium to the soil i've heard people use tums i've never done that but i do use gypsum sprinkle a handful around the root zone water it in and it won't cure the fruit that's already damaged but hopefully it will um it'll give me a nice quick shot of calcium into the plant and then make sure you keep it well watered after that now another problem you might have is sun scald and that happens when for an extended period of time the sun's rays are hitting the fruit and it's a lot of times with afternoon sun now you will get this problem when there's a lack of leaves either due to lack of water or fertilizer topping the plant like we just talked about will help because it's going to force more growth at the bottom where the leaves will be down below in the little bush instead of a tall stem that lets light in from all angles so again try to shade them in the afternoon if you want to use some shade cloth maybe put it on the side where the sun sets and that's going to protect them from sun scald all right since you're still with me i'm going to give you a bonus you know peppers do take a long time to germinate and they take several months to actually produce a harvest wouldn't it be great if we could cut a couple months off that time schedule i think so too peppers happen to be perennials now if you live in a mild winter climate like i have here a lot of times you can overwinter your peppers outdoors now i and sometimes if you're a really mild winter with absolutely zero chance of frost they can stay right into in the garden now if you don't have a frost free winter you can bring them into a basement under grow lights in a kitchen window or some other window but there's a few things you need to do to prepare the plant for that first of all dig it up remove most of the dirt if not all of the dirt and then you're going to want to use a small pot the smaller the better because you don't want it to get a lot of moisture and maintain it so the least amount of soil in there the better you're going to cut most of the plant off at least two-thirds with this one i actually did more you just want enough stems left so that there's enough places for the new leaves to grow in the spring so cut it all back you're going to remove most of the leaves and it's going to be pretty hard to do i i totally understand that in terms of emotionally hard to do but it has to be done put some indoor potting mix in there and fertilize maybe with some slow release organic fertilizer give it a good water and then don't water it anymore unless it's really really dry you want to keep it as dry as possible just on the verge but not bone dry you don't want any kind of root rot or disease to take place now once the weather warms up you can put them back outside in the garden and hopefully it doesn't always happen but hopefully you'll get a huge head start and your pepper harvest that year alright is that enough information i hope so if you learned something please give the video a thumbs up i would really appreciate that and i'll see you on self-sufficient sunday which actually this sunday we're celebrating mother's day by talking about creative ways to be self-sufficient in small spaces growing the maximum amount of food in the least amount of space so that should be a good one i'll see you then you

Channel: Next Level Gardening

Views: 770,827

Keywords: gardening, how to grow peppers, growing peppers, gardening tips, pepper, growing peppers from seed, how to grow a garden, garden, how to grow vegetables, complete, tips, organic gardening, migardener, hot peppers, organic, how to, container, how to grow hot peppers, vegetable gardening, epic gardening, container gardening, gardening ideas, beginner gardening, square foot gardening, survival gardening, urban gardening, gardening hacks, raised bed gardening, gardening for beginners

Id: 9vEdIzCj2Tk

Length: 18min 56sec (1136 seconds)

Published: Fri May 08 2020