Complimentary Blueberry Juice

Peppers have been one of my most consistently poor crops (if not outright failed crops) and it’s been quite the journey figuring out why. It seems like we’ve tried everything and over the past 8 seasons there were maybe two that we had great peppers, but even that comes with a big asterisk.

This season however finally provided the light that will lead us out of the other side of this very dark and mostly unfruitful journey.

Our hoop house peppers, only 120 plants, have been pumping out perfect peppers since the end of June, and are still going. The plants are loaded with fully ripe, firm, crunchy, juicy, flavourful and aromatic ripened peppers.

These 120 plants are out-yielding four hundred plants in the field, which are, as per the last 8 seasons, about on par for us: deformed fruit, rotten walls, one or two peppers per plant, or zero peppers per plant, and a wild difference between varieties, with our yellow and orange varieties yielding zero.

Those one or two seasons with good peppers and a big asterisk? The asterisk is that we were planting, back then, *over 1500 hundred plants.* Our strategy was hedging bets…at least we knew that we didn’t know what we were doing. And getting a pepper or two from such a large volume of plants, combined with favourable weather conditions (which we couldn’t identify, you know, some years it was just good!) allowed us to get a single big flush of fruit before the first frost. Night before freezing, we’d pick them all in one shot, and that’s all we would get. We considered that successful.

I even thought we took a step forward last year, when I was excited about the size and health of the plants, and the amazing soil structure that the peppers built. We used landscape fabric, as year after year we tend to lose peppers in the weeds. But still we had peppers with no fruits, and rotten fruits on the plants. So we’d try again, this time with no compost, as I thought the compost triggered vegetative growth and no fruits. But they got cool weather in June, excessive rain, and hail, and again, rotten fruits.

So what’s going on in the hoop house that’s so different?

These peppers, the variety Ace, were planted in the hoop house on April 20th and it has been a struggle ever since, albeit a struggle we are now on the other side of and winning. They sat there for some time, doing nothing. After a month, I pulled the plug on waiting, anxious that the same thing that happens in the field would happen here too, and I didn’t want to waste an entire season and 1/5th of my precious hoop house space for a failed crop. After consulting with an agronomist, a boosting recipe was made to shock the plants out of their sleepy state and get them moving, centered around Phosphorous and Calcium.

A couple weeks later the plants were well on their way, and the next step was to prune the king flower off of each plant, which is usually a step I skip in the field.

As the first fruits emerged, they had the same rotten wall problems as our field peppers. A recipe focusing on Calcium and Boron was made up. The fruits ever since, with only a second application of the same recipe, have been absolutely perfect.

But the most important, #1 thing, the #1 revelation, has been water. In the hoop house, water is 100% controlled. They did not get subjected to the spring deluge. And I am amazed by how little I am watering. Growing peppers in the clay is problematic….the peppers don’t like the clay, no matter what you do, and excessive rain or lower temps will destroy their momentum. Trying to get calcium out of our clay for building strong cell walls and not having any rotting fruit, is very difficult. But I have no way, as of right now, to fertilize or amend our peppers in the field. It all goes up front, which just isn’t enough.

So the hoop house provides the best possible environment for the peppers: a hot, dry, tropical, protected space. A place where I can limit water to a small amount once per week, and a place where I can feed them once a month via the drip line: a vegetative booster and a calcium/boron/molybdenum supplement.

Aside from those purple ones (the only pepper yielding in the field), these are all from the 120 hoop house Ace peppers. They look so amazing, they even look fake!

Next season will be much more ambitious for peppers and I can finally abandon any strategy I’ve adopted for the past 8 seasons and move on.

The key takeaways are:

1) Growing in protected culture. This means we’ll probably be utilizing the failed tomato caterpillar tunnel instead for pepper production. We can spread the cat tunnel low over 3 or 4 beds and remove the element of rain from the equation.

2) Controlling water 100%. Any wet feet for peppers will just stall them out. They want the hot, dry conditions they evolved to live in. We need to be careful with how waterlogged our red river clay gets.

3) Continuous nutrition. The importance of Calcium and Boron in building structure and maintaining the walls of the fruit isn’t a negotiable step, especially since Calcium will not move from the clay to the fruit, and they need the Boron to help transport it. This means I will need a way to inject my nutrition into the drip line for next season, and investing in a fertigator will be my next step.

4) Variety selection. I will need to find new orange and yellow ripened varieties. I am finding that, especially with Ace, the smaller more loaded peppers are much better for our growing situation and context.

5) Continuous harvests. Having so many peppers on each plant means we are able to be very patient, and wait and wait and wait and wait for the peppers to turn and ripen. Combined with growing in protected culture, we can start harvesting in July, have continuous harvests every week, into September and up to the frost date.

6) No compost. Peppers do not benefit at all from the compost. If anything, I can ideally grow fall greens in September and October, which use up the nitrates in the compost, leaving it as more of a biological mulch than anything supplying excessive nitrogens, phosphorous or potassium that will trigger all sorts of problems.

7) Waiting for warm soil to transplant. I think a reason the peppers stalled out after being transplanted on April 20th was maybe I was a bit ambitious with the start date. A week or 10 days later, the soil would have been a lot warmer and I may have skipped the stall-out all together. Peppers are sensitive to temperature so waiting in the spring is better than jumping the gun.

* * * * *

Well we’ll see how that goes next year, in next year’s caterpillar tunnel adventures. If I manage to get similar yields in the cat tunnel as from my 120 hoop house peppers, that would mean having 400 plants would be completely insane, and I would likely be able to save a bed for something else.

Until next year, I’ll be enjoying these red peppers. They’ll be coming out anyway in two weeks as the last thing to come out of the hoop house to switch over for late fall greens production.

Graham

thanks for reading complimentary blueberry juice

if you like this blog, please consider subscribing via email to get a post in your inbox every Wednesday, or sharing it with someone you think might enjoy it too