What is going on, everyone? Welcome to another very exciting episode right here on the MI Gardener channel. In today’s episode, we’re talking all about how to increase the yields of your pepper plants, get your plants growing healthier, and producing more fruit for you. Because I definitely have had this happen where, you know, you plant your pepper plants out and they only produce one pepper that entire year. Well, if I would have known my plants would have only produced one pepper that year, I would have just never planted them and dedicated the space to something else that would have done better. So, it can definitely be very discouraging to only have one or two fruits on a plant or to have the plants just not grow, be very slow-growing, and like I said, I can definitely relate. So if you’re going through that right now, I share in that frustration. But I’ve also found some ways to really give yourself a fighting chance. The first thing that I would say is: don’t give up. Sometimes pepper plants, because of just the type of plant that they are, need a little more time to get going. You know, pepper plants are really hot-weather plants; they love very warm weather. And so in early season, we can be very discouraged by the fact that our plants aren’t growing, our plants aren’t producing, the plants just look kind of meh and weak and feeble. And that’s because they haven’t kind of found their stride yet. You really need to give your plants enough time to acclimate to the nice warm weather. You need to allow the nights to warm up as well. If your nights are still getting into the low 50s, high 40s, that’s just not warm enough for pepper plants to really thrive. Yes, they’re going to survive and they will grow, but they’re not going to grow very fast, and any fruit that they do produce will be very few. You’re not going to get that many fruits in early season. And so having kind of just a longer time horizon, I guess you could say, just having less initial expectations right off the bat is really going to set yourself up for not being discouraged. But if you’re getting into July and August and your plants are still really behind the ball, what you can do are a few things. Let’s go back to our garden here; I’ve got a few pepper plants that are doing this right now. And if you can catch it early, if you can catch some of these things early, you can address them so that when you do get into July and August, you’re not really having these issues, and your plants can be far better off when the weather is nice and warm; you can actually be further ahead so the plants can actually start producing some fruits for you.
### Assess the Plant
So, the first thing you want to do is really assess the plant. What you want to do is you want to look for fruit. One of the things that pepper plants will sometimes do in early season is they’ll set fruit too soon. You can see here, these banana pepper plants, there’s no fruit on them; they’re beautiful, they’re absolutely just gorgeous. They’re not really focusing on fruiting; they’re focusing more on growing and then fruiting later. We’re starting to get some buds up top; that’s fantastic, these are going to be loaded with fruit. But compare that to over here; we’ve got a few pepper plants that are just not getting with the program. They have a beautiful bell pepper, gorgeous little bell pepper, but the plants are still super small. What I’m going to do is I’m going to remove this pepper, I’m going to take that inside, I can eat it, you can eat peppers at any stage, so don’t worry, you’re not wasting this stuff. But what you want to do is you want to focus the plant on growing by taking off this fruit; it’s actually going to prioritize actually growing the plant rather than setting fruit. And if it does start to flower, I can even come back here and I can pick off some of the flowers to really make sure that for the first month to two months, it’s focusing on growing. See over here, look at this, look at this little bell pepper plant, it just does not know what’s going on. There’s a bell pepper there and a bell pepper there; the plant itself is only like five and a half inches tall; it’s just pathetic. So, I’m going to come in here, I’m going to pull these peppers off, and that way, it’s really going to focus energy on producing foliage. What you’ll notice is all these beautiful tall plants, they have one thing in common; they’re all bell pepper plants. But the ones that are taller are focusing on growing rather than setting fruit. Is there any question why the smallest plants have the most amount of fruit on them? No fruit, no fruit, no fruit, none of these have fruit on them, and they’re all twice as tall, if not three times taller than these tiny plants here. So, this can happen, and sometimes the plant can focus so much energy on fruiting that it really doesn’t focus any energy at all on growing, and then you lose out on the best time of the year to put on growth, which is right now.
### Fertilizer
The second way that you can really help to increase the production on your pepper plants is by fertilizing properly. Fertilizing at the right times of the year with the right type of fertilizer is going to make a big difference. In the early season, what you really want to focus on, much like tomatoes, is nitrogen. So many people want to pump them with like a 10-10-10 or a 20-20-20; it’s just not what you want to do because pepper plants, they need lots of nitrogen to get the foliage and the plant grown up. Once the plant grows up, then it can focus on flowering and fruiting. Flowering actually utilizes phosphorus, and fruit yield actually utilizes potassium. So, phosphorus and potassium can be used later on in the season and are actually recommended for later on in the season if you want to have good fruit yield and fruit set. So what I recommend doing right now is we use Trifecta Plus on our entire garden. Trifecta Plus is kind of an outlier because it utilizes both fast-acting and slow-release ingredients. So the fast-acting nitrogen acts now; the slow-release phosphorus and potassium act later. It’s just, like I said, very special in how it’s blended. But if you’re not using Trifecta, you can use anything like blood meal, use a fish fertilizer, worm castings even are a great source of nitrogen. Alfalfa meal, kelp meal, all great sources of nitrogen to get your plant growing very strong first and then focus on phosphorus and potassium later. Things like bone meal are great, rock phosphate fantastic. You can even use things like green sand; green sand has really good amounts of potassium. You can also use things like wood ash; wood ash has great sources of potassium. Just be careful not to use too much because it can swing the pH of your soil, so be careful with that one. But a great source of potassium for your soil. Even dried banana peels
are another really good source of potassium for your garden; they just take longer to break down. So maybe consider adding them to your garden right now so that by the time they’re broken down, the plants can actually uptake them later in the growing season. But banana peels are another really good option. So just consider some of those things that the way you’re fertilizing and what you’re fertilizing with can make a big difference in just how the plant reacts and how much it produces.
### Watering
And the final note to really increasing your fruit yields on your peppers is monitoring your watering. This is something a lot of people miss because they think pepper plants, though they like to live in very arid hot climates, that they don’t need a whole lot of water. Couldn’t be further from the truth; the fruit is about 95% water. And we’ve talked about this before; if you have something that’s 95% water, if the water is not available in the soil, and you’re just letting your pepper plants grow through the hottest, driest part of summer, and you’re not supplementing with lots of water, the flowers that they’re going to produce are going to drop off, the peppers they produce are going to form blossom end rot, and that can actually cause the pepper plant to actually drop the peppers. But also, it might not even set the fruit at all. Water really helps to regulate the soil temperature, and the ideal temperature of the soil is right around 85 to 90 degrees for ideal pepper production and pepper growth. But any hotter than that, the peppers really start getting stressed; 100 degrees, 105 degrees, the pepper plants might not set any fruit at all. And also, the fruit that does set is going to be very, very small and very kind of woody and tough because they need the water to actually get plump and to produce. So if your pepper plants are getting into like July and August, the hottest parts of the season, and they’re still not producing that many peppers, check how much you’re watering. I typically give my pepper plants water if we’re not getting any rain, that is about once every other week. So once every two weeks, I’ll come in, and I’ll deep water them; I’ll really give them a ton of water, maybe about a gallon to a gallon and a half per plant. And then I do that every two weeks. So, I’m not watering that frequently, but I’m giving them lots of deep water that those roots are going to be able to tap into and produce fruit. And that really helps them to not only expand their root system because it’s encouraging the roots to move throughout the soil, but they’re also accessing that water and that water is going to help produce more fruit. Water is a huge regulator with how much fruit can be produced because the plant will not produce more fruit than it can sustain. And so it’s not going to spend that energy if the fruit can’t be set. So, make sure you’re watering on a regular basis; make sure you’re giving them lots of deep water. Make sure also that your plants are, you know, are just staying cool because if they’re getting too hot, your plants are really not going to like that either. So I hope you guys enjoyed; I hope you learned something new.
