Tomatoville® Gardening Forums - View Single Post - Pepper productivity, remove first full size peppers when green?

zipcode · June 27, 2017

I haven't really heard anything like that. I know that removing the first pepper is religion to any serious grower, but not when it's full size.
So the idea is obviously that peppers become more productive in time, sort of exponentially, since the number of 'nodes' they can produce from increases exponentially.
So you don't want the plant to lose too much time on that first pepper when the plants are usually small. Now when do you remove it? Flower, formed pepper, big pepper? I think the idea of picking it a bit later than flower has some merit, because the pepper stalk increases in diameter this way, and better supports the plant. Removing it fully grown seems to kinda defeat the purpose in the first place.

June 27, 2017	#7
zipcode Tomatovillian™ Join Date: Jun 2010 Location: Romania/Germany , z 4-6 Posts: 1,582	I haven't really heard anything like that. I know that removing the first pepper is religion to any serious grower, but not when it's full size. So the idea is obviously that peppers become more productive in time, sort of exponentially, since the number of 'nodes' they can produce from increases exponentially. So you don't want the plant to lose too much time on that first pepper when the plants are usually small. Now when do you remove it? Flower, formed pepper, big pepper? I think the idea of picking it a bit later than flower has some merit, because the pepper stalk increases in diameter this way, and better supports the plant. Removing it fully grown seems to kinda defeat the purpose in the first place.