- Welcome back to Jacques in the Garden.
In today's video, we're going to talk about
how I managed to get as many peppers
as you guys are seeing here.
It's been a very bountiful pepper year for me.
From Tequila Sunrise to escamillo,
to my favorite hot sauce pepper, the Biquinho,
I figured out how to grow peppers in my climate.
So let's talk about some of the tips that I use,
and one of the things that I've really learned is
this structure right here changed the game for me entirely.
So this structure right here
is actually a Maker Pipe six-in-one trellis kit.
I use it to build a protective microclimate for my peppers.
So remember that peppers actually come
from South and Central America.
They like more heat, they like more humidity,
and that's exactly what the structure did.
I have two examples of this kind of build.
One is in front of you over here,
and one's back here with the Maker Pipe kit.
So the one in the front is just made
with bamboo stakes around the corners.
And then I wrapped this AG-19 fabric around.
It's made by Agribon.
It's just a very common farming fabric.
What it does is it actually lets light through
to some degree.
I believe this one is a 90% transmission fabric.
What that means is that 90% of the light that hits it
passes through and makes it to the peppers.
But the other thing that it does
is that since it is a sort of fabric,
it actually retains a lot of the moisture
and the heat from the morning and the sun
as it beats down on the fabric.
So this is doing a couple different things.
It's providing a wind break,
which is where I get a lot of coastal winds
coming in right through here.
That's keeping these peppers a little bit warmer
in the night, allowing them to ripen.
It's increasing the humidity.
And in general, in the spring, I had it fully enclosed,
and that actually kept it a lot warmer,
giving me an earlier harvest.
So now let's talk a little bit
about starting your peppers and variety selection.
When it comes to the world of pepper varieties
and pepper selection, a lot of people get really hung up
on growing like these ultra hot,
super crazy hot peppers,
where they like to eat like one or two maybe.
Maybe they'll make a hot sauce,
give some to a friend to prank them.
But really there's such a huge variety of peppers out there
in the sweets and the spicy world,
that have so much more flavor
than anything you've ever ate before,
anything you could get at a grocery store,
or even really a farmer's market.
Right in front of me here is the Biquinho pepper.
It's a Brazilian pepper.
It's also called a bird's beak pepper,
'cause it has this small little point.
So this is actually a overwintered Biquinho,
which is why it's even more prolific than usual.
But this is just one plant that has a three foot diameter
going all the way around, absolutely littered in peppers.
So this is an example
of you probably only need one of these, maybe two,
and you can make an abundant amount of hot sauce.
But if you're growing something like shishitos,
actually have eight shishito plants,
because if we're four people at home,
and we want to eat a lot of shishitos,
or have guests over,
then we need to cook like 20, 60, 80 shishito peppers.
If I just have one or two plants,
I'm gonna be collecting 'em in the fridge,
and they're gonna go moldy by the time I use 'em.
So for things like shishitos, you wanna plant a lot.
For things like a super hot or spicy pepper,
you can plant less, 'cause you don't need as many.
And then for things like stuffing peppers,
like these right here, which are the Plovdiv kapia,
a wonderful thick walled pepper,
or even up here, which is the escamillo,
which is, as you can see, totally filled with peppers.
Those are frying or stuffing peppers,
and you want a lot of them,
because you don't want to just have one or two to snack on.
You want enough to make a meal.
So think about that when you start your peppers.
Try a wide variety.
Make sure you think about what your intention is
with those peppers so that you actually have enough.
The first year I grew peppers,
I grew like 20 different kinds.
I was like wow, that one was really good,
but I can't do anything cause I just ate the only pepper.
So just think about variety of selection
in how much you start.
And now let's talk about something I see right here,
which is a problem, and that is how to support your peppers,
because this one is not supported,
so let's talk about some options.
When it comes to supporting your peppers,
there's a lot of different ways to do it.
I actually think cages designed for tomatoes
actually work really well for peppers.
They are usually useless for tomatoes,
but for peppers they're pretty much perfect.
The other thing you could do with a lot of peppers
is just a single stake.
If you let your pepper kind of grow a single main stem
instead of topping it,
you get a nice sturdy main stem
that you can attach a stake right next to,
and that'll actually support the majority of your pepper.
So you can see right here I actually have an example
of two problems.
There are two peppers that I just forgot to stake,
and actually don't, they don't look very great, I'll admit.
But I'm gonna go ahead, throw this bamboo stake down.
And then what I have here
is this little sort of biodegradable fabric.
It's, I believe it's basically like T-shirt material.
I'm going to use that to tie up the plant.
The nice thing about this one is that it's biodegradable.
So I could just leave it to throw in the green bin,
or throw in the compost, and it's not a big deal.
So let's tie up this one in a second.
But first let's look at the Sugar Rush Peach.
So this thing is so loaded with peppers
that it knocked itself over,
and I just harvested about 20 peppers yesterday from it.
So what we're gonna do is also stake this one,
but I'm going to use a bigger stake,
'cause this one has a lot of little branches.
So I wanna make sure that it's a nice sturdy stake,
and that I can actually tie off as many branches
as I can to this without it wobbling or flopping over.
So what you wanna do is just kind of go next to a branch,
right underneath the leaf node,
and then you don't even have to tie it to the branch
or anything like that.
You can just loop it around,
and just tie a knot around the stake.
That way you get a little ring of cloth
that keeps your peppers up.
So right there you can see it's already up.
And if they're flopped over like this,
as they get used to the new light,
they will now upright themselves.
So that's kind of the basics.
You just wanna make sure you provide some support.
Even a single stake can carry you through the whole season.
So let's talk about harvesting and when to eat peppers.
When it comes to harvesting your peppers,
there's actually a lot of different ways to do it.
If you wanna see a perfect example of a fully ripe pepper,
I grabbed a serrano pepper from the pepper GreenStalk,
which we'll talk about next.
But you could see, first of all, it's red.
So a serrano is usually green, so that's definitely ripe.
But then when you see these vertical lines,
it's called corking.
When it corks, it's fully ripe, essentially.
There's really nothing else for it to do
except start drying off.
So I'd say fully corked pepper.
But as we go through here,
I'm gonna harvest some of these escamillo peppers,
and you could see there's a little bit
of blush of green with the orange.
This bright orange is the hue you're primarily looking for,
but it doesn't matter.
A green pepper is just an unripe pepper.
There's nothing fancy about, for example, a green bell.
So this escamillo right here that's fully ripe,
it's fully orange all throughout,
is the same pepper as this green pepper right here,
which is from the same plant.
If you eat it at this stage, it'll have a different flavor.
It'll just be more reminiscent
of what you think of a green pepper.
It's not gonna be as sweet,
but it'll have more of that savory flavor to it.
You wanna make sure
that you're harvesting your peppers constantly
so that they're not wasting energy sitting on the plant.
So right here you see that little bit of blush of green.
If I leave this on the counter inside,
it'll probably ripen within a day.
But peppers, I find if you ripen on the counter,
don't do that well.
They'll start to dry out rather than fully ripen.
And so what I like to do is wait
until they're closer to fully ripe,
or just eat 'em like this.
'Cause at this stage,
it's gonna be an absolutely delicious pepper.
I have another maybe 10 escamillos
of that equivalent size and readiness that I could harvest.
But I just wanted to talk about harvesting
and trying your peppers at different stages,
because one that has a little bit of green blush
compared to one that's fully ripe,
they're all gonna taste different,
and you might actually find
that you prefer this one more than this one.
So try them out at all different stages.
Now let's go look at that GreenStalk,
and see how to support peppers in that.
Collected a few peppers, just a couple to get the day going.
I actually got an equivalent harvest of that
basically a week ago.
At this stage in the game,
I'm getting easily one to two baskets like this
every week, no problem.
Now, the thing I wanted to talk about here
is this five-tier GreenStalk.
I found that the five-tier GreenStalk
has actually worked really well for peppers.
All the peppers I put in here
I actually put as kind of a throwaway.
I had all these extra plants and nowhere to put 'em.
I was looking at my GreenStalk,
I was like, why don't I just throw 'em in there?
This should be fine.
And actually they've been doing really well.
I have poblanos up here, serranos,
this Golden Pippin Honey pepper, which is a funny name,
but it's a really weird pepper.
It starts off purple, and then it turns orange-yellow.
So I've never seen that before.
I'm looking forward to trying it.
But the thing I wanted to talk about here
is actually that first of all,
you could grow great peppers in your GreenStalk,
but second, it's actually really easy to support them
on every row except the top row.
So what I like to do, and what I've done on this one
and this one already,
is I'll come by with a piece of fabric or twine,
I'll find a nice leaf node.
And then what I actually do
is I push it behind one of the top cells above it.
And what happens here
is that the actual cell from the planter
is sitting on this next one,
and it's creating a boundary
where the string can actually pass through it.
So if I push the string behind it,
and maybe we'll come in a little closer
and show you exactly what I'm talking about,
I could actually support the entire pepper
directly onto the GreenStalk.
I don't know if this will last forever,
or for like an extremely heavy load of peppers,
but you can see this one's very upright.
This one's very upright,
and the one I just did is now very upright,
and that's because I've tied it down to the GreenStalk.
So that's a nice little bonus tip.
The other thing I wanted to quickly mention
is that when you're starting your peppers from seed,
you might expect that they're not growing very well,
or they're growing very slowly.
But as soon as you pot them up just once,
they will actually start growing way faster.
So with peppers, as soon as I have a set of true leaves,
I like to pot 'em up,
because then, essentially in a couple weeks,
you get a quadrupling or quintupling of growth
just from potting up.
So potting up peppers is really crucial.
And I'll also quickly mention while we're here
is that I normally don't pinch my peppers.
I only pinch peppers that are small,
like maybe a Biquinho pepper or even a shishito.
But even if you don't,
I find that it doesn't make that much of a difference.
Especially for these larger peppers,
I will never pinch, because if I do,
I would have a lot of low growth that I can't support,
and the peppers would end up growing on the ground.
So that was kind of a collection
of all the major tips and tricks
that I've learned this season
for how to get this giant abundance of peppers.
And believe me, it's still cranking out
and will continue to crank out into winter.
So hopefully you guys learned something.
Till next time, I'll see ya in the garden.
(mellow acoustic music)