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Want Bigger Peppers? Never Make These 5 Mistakes
Are your pepper plants growing slowly, producing tiny peppers, or struggling to thrive? The problem may not be the variety—it's often a few common mistakes that hold your plants back.
In this video, you'll discover the **5 biggest pepper-growing mistakes** that many gardeners make and, more importantly, how to avoid them. Whether you're growing bell peppers, jalapeños, cayenne, or other hot peppers, these simple tips can help you grow healthier plants and enjoy a much bigger harvest.
🌶️ **In this video you'll learn:**
- The most common mistakes that stunt pepper growth
- How to water peppers the right way
- The best soil and fertilizer for maximum production
- Why sunlight and spacing matter
- Simple tips to grow larger, healthier peppers all season
These easy gardening techniques are perfect for beginners and experienced gardeners alike. Make a few small changes, and you'll be amazed at the difference in your pepper harvest!
đź‘Ť If you found this video helpful, **LIKE**, **SUBSCRIBE**, and turn on notifications for more gardening tips
Want Bigger Peppers? Never Make These 5 Mistakes
Are your pepper plants growing slowly, producing tiny peppers, or struggling to thrive? The problem may not be the variety—it's often a few common mistakes that hold your plants back.
In this video, you'll discover the **5 biggest pepper-growing mistakes** that many gardeners make and, more importantly, how to avoid them. Whether you're growing bell peppers, jalapeños, cayenne, or other hot peppers, these simple tips can help you grow healthier plants and enjoy a much bigger harvest.
🌶️ **In this video you'll learn:**
- The most common mistakes that stunt pepper growth
- How to water peppers the right way
- The best soil and fertilizer for maximum production
- Why sunlight and spacing matter
- Simple tips to grow larger, healthier peppers all season
These easy gardening techniques are perfect for beginners and experienced gardeners alike. Make a few small changes, and you'll be amazed at the difference in your pepper harvest!
đź‘Ť If you found this video helpful, **LIKE**, **SUBSCRIBE**, and turn on notifications for more gardening tips
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00The pepper was the very first thing I ever learned to grow well, and I have grown them every year
00:05since, more years than I care to count. My grandfather set me a little patch of peppers
00:11to tend when I was a boy, my own to look after, and I was so proud of it. And
00:17I killed near half
00:18of them that first summer through pure ignorance, overtending some and starving others and letting
00:24the July sun cook the rest, and I remember being near to tears over it. He did not scold
00:31me. He walked the row with me and showed me, one plant at a time, what each one had needed
00:37and not gotten. I have never forgotten a single thing he showed me that day, and most of what
00:43I am about to tell you I first learned standing in that row with him. And in all that time
00:50since, I have made every mistake a body can make with a pepper, so that today I can save
00:57you the trouble of making them yourself. That is the whole point of an old man talking.
01:03He has already done the failing, so you do not have to.
01:08So today I am going to give you five mistakes I see folks make with peppers over and over,
01:14five things that keep good gardeners from the fine, heavy harvest they ought to be getting.
01:21Learn these five, and your peppers will bear you fruit right up until the frost.
01:27My name is Elias Yoder, and I farm here in Lancaster County in Pennsylvania. And the pepper is a generous
01:35plant and a willing one, disease-hardy and tough, and it wants to give you a big crop. Mostly what
01:43stands
01:43in its way is a handful of plain mistakes, and every one of them is easy to fix once you
01:50know it.
01:51Before I go on, I will say this once and then leave it be. I gathered the whole of it,
01:57all these old ways
01:59of growing your own food, into a book. You can find it at EliasYoder.com. The book is the long
02:08version.
02:08If you want it, it is there. I will not mention it again.
02:13The first mistake is in the transplanting, in how you set your young plants into the ground.
02:20And there is one part of it hardly anyone knows, so listen close, because this is the freshest thing
02:27I have to tell you today. Before you set a pepper plant in the ground, you should strip off its
02:33lowest
02:34leaves, the bottom set or two. And here is why. Most of the troubles that afflict a pepper are diseases
02:42that come up out of the soil. When the rain falls, or when you water, the drops strike the bare
02:49ground
02:50and splash little bits of soil up onto the underside of that plant, and the lowest leaves,
02:56being closest to the ground, catch that dirty splash first. And in that splashed soil, ride the spores
03:05of the fungus and the blight, and they take hold on those low leaves and then climb up into the
03:11whole plant.
03:13So those bottom leaves are the doorway the disease comes in by.
03:18Strip them off, and you have raised the plant's skirts up out of the splash zone, and shut that door.
03:25Once a pepper is grown to any size, those lowest leaves do it no good anyhow, so you lose nothing
03:33and gain much.
03:34But here is the part almost nobody knows, and it is the whole reason I put this first.
03:41Do not strip those leaves off at the very moment you plant. Do it a day or two before. Because
03:49when you
03:50tear a leaf off, you leave a little open wound on the stem where it was, and a fresh wound
03:57is itself
03:58a doorway for disease. So if you strip the leaves and plant the same minute, you have set your plant
04:05down into the damp soil with open wounds all up its stem, an invitation to every rot there is.
04:14Strip the leaves a day or two ahead, while the plant is still up out of the ground in the
04:20dry air,
04:21and let those little wounds dry and heal over and close. Then when you plant it, the stem is sealed
04:29and
04:30sound. That one small piece of timing, stripping the leaves early rather than at planting, will save
04:38you more sick plants than you would believe. Now while I am on the transplanting, one quick word,
04:46for I have said it before in another video and will not belabor it here. Do not bury a pepper
04:53deep
04:53the way you bury a tomato. A tomato roots all up its buried stem and loves deep planting. A pepper
05:02does
05:03not, and a buried pepper stem is more apt to rot than to root. So set your pepper at the
05:10same depth
05:11it grew in its pot, no deeper, and leave the deep planting for your tomatoes. Strip the lower leaves early,
05:19plant at the right depth, and you have begun well. And here is the companion to stripping those leaves,
05:26the other half of keeping the soil splash disease off your peppers. Lay down a good mulch.
05:34A blanket of straw or leaves or clean grass over the bare soil around your plants means the raindrops
05:42strike the mulch instead of striking bare dirt, and so they throw up no splash of dirty soil
05:48soil at all. Between the two, the stripped skirts and the mulched ground, you have shut the disease
05:56out both ways, and a mulched pepper with its low leaves off will stay clean and sound where a bare
06:03ground plant with its skirts dragging comes down sick. The mulch does its usual good besides, holding the
06:12moisture even, and keeping the weeds down. So mulch them. The second mistake is starving your peppers,
06:21and folks do this because they think a pepper is a small, light-feeding plant. They picture a little
06:28foot-tall thing. But a well-grown pepper is no small plant. It will grow you three and four feet
06:35tall in a
06:36single summer and hang itself heavy with fruit clear until frost, and to do all that it must eat.
06:44A pepper is a hungry plant, and the commonest reason folks get a poor thin crop is simply that they
06:51never
06:52fed it enough to make a good one. So feed them, and feed them well and steady. Start with rich
06:59ground,
07:00plenty of good compost and old rotted manure worked in before you plant. Then feed them along through
07:08the whole season, every couple of weeks, with a good drink of manure tea or compost tea, and a little
07:15bone meal scratched into the soil around them for the blooming and the fruit, and a dusting of wood ash
07:22for strength. You are asking that plant to build fruit after fruit for months on end. You must
07:30keep putting back into it what you keep taking out, or it will wear down and quit on you by
07:36mid-summer.
07:37Feed it, and it bears till frost. Now the third mistake, and this one will surprise a great many of
07:45you,
07:46for it goes against what every seed tag and every nursery sign will tell you. They all say to plant
07:53your
07:54peppers in full sun. And in the fierce heat of high summer, full sun is very often too much for
08:02a pepper,
08:02and it is why so many folks watch their plants wilt and quit in July and never understand why.
08:10Here is the thing to understand about a pepper. It did not come from an open, sun-baked field. It
08:18is,
08:18by its nature, a plant of warm country, and in that warm country it grew along the edges and floors
08:26of
08:26forests, in broken, dappled light, shaded part of the day by the taller things above it. It is a shade
08:34-loving
08:34thing at heart, a plant of the forest edge, not of the open field. So when we set it out
08:42under the full,
08:43naked sun of an American summer, with that hard-beating July and August sun overhead, we are giving it far
08:52more than its nature is built to bear. The leaves scald. The plant wilts in the afternoon, even when the
09:00soil
09:00is damp. It drops its blossoms, and it quits setting fruit. Now why do the tags say full sun, and
09:09why do we
09:10plant them so? Because there is a real reason for it in the spring. Here in our country, we have
09:17only a short,
09:18warm season to grow a pepper in, five or six months before the frost, and we need to push all
09:25the growth
09:25we can into that plant early. In the spring, when the sun is still weak and gentle and the days
09:32short,
09:33full sun is just right, and it drives that young plant to grow fast and strong while it can.
09:41The trouble only comes later, when that same spot that was kind in May turns savage in July.
09:48So the answer is to give them the spring sun, and then shelter them from the summer sun.
09:55There are a few ways to do it. The simplest is to plant them where they catch the gentle morning
10:00sun,
10:01and then fall into shade through the hard, hot afternoon, on the east side of a building,
10:07or a tall row of something, so they get their five or six hours of kind morning light,
10:12and are spared the brutal afternoon. Another way, if you grow in containers or bags,
10:19is to set them in the full spring sun, and then simply carry them into afternoon shade once the
10:25real heat comes, which is one of the fine advantages of growing in a movable vessel, as I have told
10:32you
10:32before. And the way I like best is to stretch a length of light shade cloth on a few hoops
10:39over the
10:39bed when the fiercest heat arrives, giving them that broken, dappled shade their nature wants,
10:46right through the worst of the summer. Whichever way you choose, the lesson is the same. Full sun in
10:53the mild spring to drive their growth, and shelter from the savage sun of high summer to keep them
10:59from quitting. Do that, and your peppers will bear straight through the heat that stops everyone
11:05else's. The fourth mistake is one I frankly do not understand, but I see it going around, and that is
11:13folks cutting their young pepper plants hard back at planting time, stumping them down low, in the
11:19notion that it makes them grow bushier. Now hear me. Do not do this. Think of where we stand. We
11:27have
11:27only that short window, five or six months, to get a whole crop of peppers out of a plant before
11:33the
11:33frost takes it. Every week counts. And when you cut a young plant hard back like that, you set it
11:40back
11:40three or four weeks or more while it recovers and regrows what you cut away. You have taken a whole
11:47month, near a fifth of your entire growing season, and thrown it clean away, and for what? For a shape.
11:54It makes no sense in a short season. In its warm home country, a pepper is not even a yearly
12:01plant.
12:01It will live and bear for years on end where no frost comes, and there a body has all the
12:07time in the world
12:08to prune and shape it however he likes. But we are not there. We are racing the frost. So do
12:15not
12:16hobble your plant at the start of the race by cutting it back. Let it grow. Now there is honest
12:22pruning and there is foolish pruning, so let me be fair and tell you the times pruning a pepper is
12:28right.
12:29Stripping those low leaves at planting, as I told you, that is good. Cutting away a diseased leaf or
12:36branch the moment you see sickness start, so it does not spread. That is good and wise.
12:42And late in a long hot summer, if your plants have got tired and beaten down by the heat and
12:48quit
12:48bearing, you can cut them back somewhat and feed them well, and they will often flush out fresh and
12:55give you a whole second harvest in the cooler fall before frost. Those are all good reasons. But stumping a
13:03healthy young plant at transplant in a short season to make it bushy? No. That only costs you a month
13:10you
13:10cannot spare. And the fifth mistake is not picking your peppers often enough, and this one costs you
13:17dearly without your ever knowing it. A pepper is one of those plants where the more you pick, the more
13:22you
13:23get. And if you understand why, you will never leave them hanging again. That plant has only so much
13:29strength in it at any time, and it must divide that strength among several jobs at once, growing new
13:35leaves and branches, growing new roots, pushing out new flowers, and ripening the fruit it already carries.
13:43Now here is the thing. Ripening and carrying a load of big mature peppers takes a great deal of that
13:49strength. So if you let your plant hang full of big peppers and never pick them, all its strength goes
13:55into holding and ripening that load, and it has none left over to make new flowers. The plant, feeling
14:02itself loaded with fruit, believes its work is done and slows right down. But if you keep picking those
14:08peppers off as they come ready, you relieve the plant of that burden, and it turns its freed up strength
14:14right back into making more flowers and more fruit. So a pepper picked faithfully bears two and three times
14:21what a pepper picked lazily does. The same law I gave you for the cucumbers holds just as true here.
14:29Pick often, and pick as soon as a pepper has reached the size and color you want it, while it
14:36is still bright
14:36and firm, and never let old peppers hang and shrivel on the plant. For a shriveling pepper is doing nothing
14:44but robbing strength that should be making you new ones. And only remember, as I said with the feeding,
14:52that all this hard picking asks hard feeding in return. A plant you are stripping of fruit every few days
14:59is a plant working hard, and it must be fed to match or it will wear out. Pick hard, feed
15:08hard. The two go
15:09together. Let me say a plain word about who profits from you not knowing all these five, and it is
15:17no
15:18dark scheme. Not one of the fixes costs a thing. Stripping a few leaves costs nothing. A bit of shade
15:26cloth once lasts for years. Not cutting your plant back costs nothing. It saves you effort. Picking often
15:35costs nothing but a walk down the row. And feeding them you do with your own compost and manure. There
15:44is no product anywhere in any of it. And so nobody advertises these things, and nobody teaches them,
15:51while the store goes on selling peppers to folks whose own plants quit in July for want of a little
15:58shade. Or never bore well for want of a stripped leaf and a steady feeding. It is not hidden from
16:06you.
16:07It is only never taught, because no one earns a wage teaching you to need the store less. The money
16:15runs
16:15the other way, and always has. So there are your five. Strip the lowest leaves a day or two before
16:23you
16:24plant, so the wounds heal and the disease stays out of the splash. Feed them generous and steady,
16:31for they are hungry plants. Give them the gentle spring sun, but shelter them from the savage summer
16:38sun, for they are shade plants at heart. Do not cut them hard back at transplant and throw away a
16:46month
16:47you cannot spare. And pick them often and early to keep them bearing, feeding hard to match. Mind those
16:56five, and your peppers will hang heavy and bear you fruit clear until the frost. Tell me down in the
17:04comments what county you garden in, and which of these five you have been guilty of, for I have been
17:11guilty of every one in my time. And if you have a pepper trick of your own, a variety your
17:18family
17:18always grew, or a way you keep them bearing, put it down there, for I am always glad to learn
17:25another.
17:26Next time out here, I want to show you how to build a proper compost pile the old way, layer
17:33upon layer,
17:34so that you make your own black crumbly gold to feed these hungry plants, for a pepper eats well, and
17:42that pile
17:43is how you feed it for nothing. It is the foundation under all of it, and it is past time
17:50I showed you.
17:51But for now, remember this. A pepper is not a hard plant to grow. It is a willing one, held
17:59back only by a few
18:01plain mistakes, and every one of them is yours to fix. Give it a clean start, a steady feeding, shelter
18:10from
18:11the worst sun, its own time to grow, and a faithful picking, and it will hand you more peppers than
18:19you
18:19know what to do with. The people who built this country with their hands knew that, and we are only
18:27just starting to remember it.
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