Pick the Mediums, Leave the Smalls: A Hot Day in the Pepper Rows
I’m still getting used to ‘vlogging’… I spent most of this day in the garden and didn't film a single thing until the sun was almost down
So what y’all get is the end of the day: me in the pepper rows, sweaty, trying to get one more row done before I lost the light.
A hot day, slow and steady
It was hot. Hot today, and hot again tomorrow, with a lot left to do over on our side of the farm here. But I got a lot done, and I'm proud of it, because I did it the only way that works in that heat: slow and steady, with lots of breaks.
The girls kept me company in the garden, which is its own kind of double edged sword…. Help AND distraction.
By sunset I had a big harvest in the bins. Greens in one, colorfuls (red, yellow, and the orange one’s that did in fact grow, but none larger than a plum. WTF?) in the other, and more greens than I expected.
The picking trick that made our peppers bigger
If you grow peppers - This worked for me this summer, but if you’ve got a trick that works better PLEASE LET ME KNOW!!!
A few weeks back I picked the plants real real hard. I took every big pepper and every medium pepper and left only the small ones. And I pruned them a bit- diseased or weird branches, or branches that had flopped right over but the rest of the plant was thriving….. And then I didn't pick peppers again for two weeks.
When I came back, those small ones had sized up. Not a little. A lot.
So here's the rule this gardener is going by now: pick the larges and the mediums, leave the smalls, and give them a couple of weeks. If you strip the plant every time you walk by, you never let the next round catch up.
The other thing I did was mostly an accident. After picking hard, I came through with the mower and knocked the plants back a bit. Between the hard picking, intentional pruning and that rough trim, the peppers that came on after were bigger. I'm not telling you to go mow your peppers. I'm telling you what happened on ours……. please I do not reccomend taking a push mower to your crops 😂
What doesn't make it to the stand
Some peppers come in striped, half turned from green to color. Often they complete their coloring on their own, other times they don’t…. But I think they're beautiful!!! However…. Nobody buys them. So those are the ones we eat.
And the honest cost of peppers isn't the seed or the plants. It's the picking. They take forever. Every one of those little guys in the bin got planted early enough for early harvest, and we (along with a lot of help from my father in law and brother in law, adam) covered them up on every single cold night this past spring, which got a little dicey the night of April 20…. (My fellow maryland farmers know… Say a prayer for the 2026 Maryland grape harvest) Then each pepper got picked by hand, intentionally, one at a time. [Is there another way to do it?]
Oh, and then there was a kitten
Right in the middle of the rows, a stray kitten showed up. That was the end of getting anything else done for a while. Everyone stopped to catch him, and nobody regrets it.
He’s my mother in laws newest baby now, nicknamed baby kitty, or Dr. Pepper, or spike.
We almost missed the sunset trying to finish one more row. We didn't. It was worth stopping for.
If you want to see the harvest, the kitten and the sunset, the full video is on YouTube: Watch the full video.
Related: Harvesting Tabasco Peppers on a Day That I Did Not Feel Myself · Find a farm stand near you