Let’s briefly talk about peppers again. Our plants are starting to develop flowers, so let’s discuss where we differ in our opinions about how best to handle this.
You might have come into the practice of removing the flower sites, supposedly to help the plant “focus” on more vegetative growth. While technically this does work, it’s rather short sighted in a cold climate and short growing seasons like ours. Those flower sites are potential early peppers, which is what we definitely want to achieve!
The name of the game, with pretty much all of our fruiting plants, is early maturity. The earlier we can get that fruit, the better your chances are at that fruit fully maturing.
Now, if you’re dealing with a nine month growing season, that’s a different story. Techniques like topping your pepper plants and removing flower sites do have their benefits. In these climates, you have months of leeway. In the north, we have zero leeway and need every fruit we can get!
If you truly want to get your plants physically bigger, the “northern answer” is to start earlier and give those plants more soil. This isn’t an “either/or” solution, you really have to do both. We really find some huge benefits to up-potting our peppers into “near” gallon pots as it really helps them fill out, just before we put them outside.
Many less experienced growers may not fully appreciate that various techniques have applicability based on your growing climate and environment! This is true for a lot of things. At far northern latitudes, we can’t always do what they do in the “south” because things work differently here! That’s one of the reasons we do this Frosty Garden thing, because it’s really hard to pick these things apart!
We’ll be keeping our peppers indoors until night time temperatures are safely around 50 degrees Fahrenheit. In the mean time, they’re just chilling under grow lights and enjoying every minute of it!
