Stringing Peppers

I'm a de montreuil who pass outreach specialist in the Department of Horticulture and with the Center for regional food systems at Michigan State University today we're here at Tenon's farm to talk about how to string peppers so we're in a 30 by 96 foot hoop house right now we've got a number of different crops growing in this particular house so when we do peppers there's lots of different ways to do them lots of different spacings depending on bed sizes variety and and so what we do is in our four foot wide beds here we do 2.2 rows and depending on which type of pepper they are the spacing in row is a little different so here we've got some lunch box peppers which are the small you know red orange and yellow ones that you see at the grocery store as well they don't get much bigger than these here but they're sweet and we harvested yesterday so there's not many colored ones on them now but they just started turning a few weeks ago so when we do these kind of peppers in row spacing is about one foot so you can see down here you know we've got these plants are really pretty close together and for the bells we do some red Knight and some California wonder these ones are spaced at 18 inches in the row so again it's a 4 foot wide bed two rows and then either a 1 foot or an 18 inches depending we also do some hot peppers some habanero some jalapenos and a few other other hot ones and for those were usually spaced at 18 inches as well so there's lots of different ways to string them each farm does it a little bit differently but this is how we do it here so each of these rows gets one of these one inch by one inch by 40 inch stakes so what we do is we take one of these we pound it every three plants so you can see there's another one here a couple plants another one here so what we do is we've got this tomato twine here biotin boxes of 7,500 feet and we string these just like we would string or basket weave determinate tomatoes so we're going to run the string down one side wrapping it around each of the posts then we're going to come back on the other side and what's going to happen is the string is going to hold these peppers up keep them off the ground keep some good airflow going through there and and keep them really nice and healthy we usually end up depending on the peppers with two or three of lines of this per season so we go ahead and we just tie a knot on the end here again there's lots of different ways to do this some people like to use a stick wrapped around the string to help them get and weave in and out that works great this is just what's worked for us now so the key is to keeping this string as taut as possible once it gets loose or gets caught or tangled on anything it becomes a real pain to untangle and to get it to hold these plants tight so you don't want to go ahead and put all of your strings on in the beginning of the season when the plants are small because what ends up happening is that as they grow you're trying to jam them up through there and they end up being damaged so we do it as the plants grow and they can be a little bit taller like this and you can just use your hand kind of like that pull them back and run that string under you want to make sure that you run it under a fruit so that you don't run it on the outside of it so that as the fruit grows it doesn't cut into there right so then we come on this side of the plant sometimes you wrap it once sometimes we wrap it twice just depends on and I guess what we're feeling like or how taut we want this or how heavy the plants are then we go on the other side of these plants go ahead and wrap it come on this side of these plants wrap it the side of these plants you can see once you get going and once you do it enough it's pretty easy to get a good rhythm going and then we go ahead and we would do it all the way down and then when we come back we want to go on the other side of these plants and make sure that we're catching them to hold them up flip it over there and you can see when we pull it you know depending on how taut you know it's going to pull those plants right together and hold them up off the ground it also makes picking a whole lot easier as well because they're up higher and we don't also get any rotting down where the peppers might be laying on the ground if we just let them fall over you can see this one's way over it's really easy just take your arm pull it up we go under some of that fruit hook it there you can see now that's a whole lot easier we can see the fruit on here it's nice and big going really well it's good year for peppers for us and again just going to hold pull it tight there and that'll keep it from from falling down onto the ground and then what we tend to do at the end when we come back down and tie on to this just take a pair of scissors hold it taut here cut on that side then we usually find what we started with first when we first tied on we just go ahead and tie a knot in there and there we go so that's how we string up peppers here again lots of different ways to do it but this is something that's worked really well for us and it also makes picking on both sides of the plant so much easier you

Channel: Michigan Farmers Market Association

Views: 119,611

Rating: 4.8804698 out of 5

Keywords: peppers, weaving peppers, basket weave, pepper spacing, disease control, vegetables, reducing farm labor, hoophouse, hoop house, MSU, Michigan State University, horticulture, Center for Regional Food Syste, MIFMA, Michigan Farmers Market Associ, farmers markets, SCBG, specialty crops, MDARD, Michigan Department of Agricul, beginning farmer

Id: dJdVcqJn8tY

Length: 5min 34sec (334 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 18 2015