So, a few days ago, we discussed various plant manipulation that can be used to help plants mature in colder climates. Well, there’s quite a few plants that just will not work for. But, there are ways!
When it comes to our pepper plants, we can’t simply top them late in the season. Peppers are very sensitive to damage, often taking several weeks to recover. We don’t have that time to waste! The only time to do this is in the early season and honestly, we question that practice very heavily in the face of a short growing season.
Even though we have a ripe pepper, the plant must still send water and nutrition to it to keep it maturing to the point where it will naturally fall off. That’s how peppers propagate in the wild. The fruit drops to the ground, which then decomposes, which allows the seeds to be exposed to the ground, rainwater and theoretically a suitable growing environment. (Which, ahem, is not the subarctic.)
But, if we continually pick the mature fruit, that’s less resources that the plant has to divert towards those mature fruit. Our mature plant is then able to divert those resources to fruit that still needs maturing. It rapidly speeds up maturation, especially with lesser and lesser numbers of fruit demanding resources.
As we mentioned earlier in the season, this can also encourage the plant to flower more as well. At this stage of the game, with sub 30 frost free growing days left, that doesn’t do us much good as those fruit will not mature. Like with tomatoes, you can remove the flowers and this will again reduce resources spent. However, we find that our cold climate deals with this naturally as the pepper often starts shedding flowers once the cooler nights descend.
We’ll have several pepper picking harvests over the next several weeks as the fruit matures. We’re aiming for ripe peppers with those harvests, primarily for the purposes of helping the plant mature more fruit.
As for our final harvest time, we do a full cleanup at the end of the season. We have found peppers surprisingly resilient to frosts, despite their warm loving stature. The plant itself will often perish or become severely damaged, but the fruit itself is usually unscathed by early frosts. Nonetheless, we aim for “around first frost” as our final harvest time, whether those frosts are present or not.
We’ll be talking about some of our favorite peppers that we’re growing this year, of course. But that’s going to have to wait for another day. We want to help you maximize those ripe peppers as they’re truly a treat, often being much sweeter and rich than their green pepper counterparts.
