Growing peppers is, well, awesome. It’s not hard and the yields can keep your kitchen fully stocked all summer long. But like all things gardening, there are some pitfalls. So in an effort to help you avoid the problems that we’ve run into in the past, here our Top 10 pepper mistakes you’ll want to avoid.
1 | Don’t Plant Peppers Too Early
So the number one mistake that you can make with peppers is plant them too early.
Pepper just don’t react well when they’re planted too soon. It’ll stunt their growth for a while and sometimes even forever. And on occasion they’ll never recover. Peppers can be fussy that way.
So whether you’re growing from seed indoors or you’re growing from transplants from the garden center, you want to wait and put them in your garden beds when the nighttime temperatures get to the upper 50s and low 60s and above.
That’s going to make sure that the soil is warm enough and not only the soil temperature, though the air temperature is warm enough for them to take off and really Do a good job and not sit there and do nothing for months or even the season.
So if you started your seeds indoors, then you want to keep close tabs on the temperatures. You might have to transplant them from smaller seed starting containers that they came in to a larger pot to keep them indoors until the temperature warms enough to transplant them.
That would be better than putting them out too soon.
2 | Too Much or Not Enough Sun
The second mistake we’ve made is planting peppers our garden is to place them where they get either too much sun or not enough.
Peppers like sun. No doubt about that. They need about six to eight hours of sun per day. If they don’t get quite enough sun, it’s going to result in a lack of production. They’re simply not going to produce as many peppers and it’s going to take forever for the fruit to actually ripen.
You want the sunlight hours (those six to eight hours) to be morning and midday sun in order for the peppers to get the right amount of sun exposure. You want them to have some afternoon shade and the reason you want them to have afternoon shade and not morning shade is that the afternoon sun is the strongest and the hottest.
If you have a place that you get midday and afternoon sun that would work but peppers suffer from sun scald very easily. (Sun scald is when there is a place on the pepper, usually facing the afternoon sunset, that is going to end up with an inedible mark that could actually end up causing cause rotting.)
If you have more than six to eight hours of sunlight in your garden, then just make sure on the sunset side to put up some shade cloth or plant some companion plants on that side so that the peppers are shaded when that hot direct afternoon starts blazing.
3 | Planting Peppers To Close Together
Peppers need some space. Don’t bunch them together. The optimal spacing is 18 inches.
The reason for the ample spacing is that peppers are very hungry plants. They like a lot of nutrients and you don’t want other plants crowding them and taking their nutrients. So 18 inches will give them the space they need.
4 | Improper Watering
The next mistake is improper watering. Improper watering can cause all manner of problems.
Just like tomatoes, you want to water a pepper plant from below. You don’t want to get the leaves wet or especially splash water from the soil to the leaves and introduce soil-borne bacteria to the leaves.
And just as important is to water consistently. Inconsistent watering can have the same effect on peppers as on tomatoes: the dreaded blossom end rot.
So water consistently and water from below very gently and you’ll be fine.
5 | Using the Wrong Fertilizer on Peppers
The fifth mistake is using the wrong fertilizer. Peppers are really sensitive to nitrogen, so a little nitrogen can go a long way. If you put too much nitrogen on a plant, all you’re going to get is leaves and you’re not going to get a bunch of fruit.
For peppers, I use either rock phosphate or Neptune Harvest’s Crab and Lobster Shell. They have low or no nitrogen and high phosphorus. We use the middle number, which is for roots and flowers and fruit development.
6 | Pruning Your Peppers
The sixth mistake is not pruning your peppers. Now there’s a big debate about whether you should prune or not. I prune my peppers because your plant is going to bear more fruit.
If you don’t prune your peppers, you’re going to get one long main stock. It’s going to grow about two feet tall. That’s the problem. There are fewer growth points to produce flowers, which results in less fruit.
It also becomes very top-heavy, especially when the fruit starts to mature. All it takes for wind is to blow your plant down and possibly snap it or hurt the root system.
So you want to start pruning when your plant is less than a foot tall. Typically, all you have to do is take out the growth tip when the plant is about eight inches tall. You can leave the six to eight leaves after you pinch out the top.
That’s going to force the hormones that generally go to the tip of that plant back down through the main stem and out through all of the leaf nodes. It’s going to help make a nice compact bushy plant with tons of growth points for lots of fruit and it’s not going to be as top heavy.
7 | Staking Your Peppers
Number seven is pretty simple: it kind of follows number six and that involves not staking your plants. As I’ve already noted, peppers can get very top-heavy, especially if you didn’t prune them. So you’re going to need to stake them.
You don’t need anything heavy duty to stake them. Simple bamboo stakes will work just fine. A little bamboo stake and a little elastic or green tie to tie them up is all you need to protect the plant from falling over and hurting itself.
8 | Harvest Continually or Else
With peppers, you’ve got to keep harvesting them throughout the summer.
You won’t have problems with over harvesting. Trust me, you want to keep picking them. This isn’t as much of a problem on the bell peppers and poblanos and other peppers that have a large fruit.
But plants like shishitos or sweetie drops, which have little peppers that can easily be covered by leaves, you must make sure to keep picking them because if you don’t, the plant will go into “My job is done here” mode. It’ll pretty much feel it’s produced its seed and can retire for the year.
You, of course, don’t your plant to call it a year in the middle of summer. The way to avoid that is to keep harvesting and your plant will keep producing.
9 | Pepper Pests
Number nine is not keeping on top of pests. Pests and disease aren’t as much of a problem with peppers as they are with tomatoes. But you have to stay on top of it.
The biggest thing we get is leaf miner and that’s when you start seeing little tracks (they look like little race tracks) through the leaves. You can control that with neem oil. I spray my peppers every two weeks with neem oil and that keeps the leaf miner away. An added benefit of neem oil is that it’ll keep the aphids and white flies away.
10 | Making It Too Hard for Yourself
The last mistake that people make is creating too much work for themselves. Maybe that’s you. That was certainly me.
Peppers are perennials and even in the coldest climate you can overwinter your peppers. Overwintering simply means that protecting your plans during the winter so they can flower again the following year. Peppers are pretty darn hardy.
So you don’t have to start from seeds every year. You’re working too hard, if you are. You can get it off to a faster start by overwintering, which means sooner crops and a longer fruiting period.
In a frost free climate, you can leave the plants right in the beds. In a mild climate, you can either cover them on colder nights or I put them in a pot and put under a tree or under the eaves of our house just for that extra bit of protection.
Now, if you live in a climate where you get lots of frost, maybe even snow, you can first cut all the leaves off of your pepper plant. Once you’ve take all the leaves off, you cut down almost two-thirds of the plant off. You want to leave some branching on the main stems down at the bottom for the leaves to appear in the spring.
Then dig it up, remove almost all the dirt and put it into a very tiny pot and then just keep the plant very moist over the winter inside. If you have grow lights great, if not, you can put it in a garage under a window (or any type of window) just so it gets a little bit of light.
It doesn’t need six to eight hours during the winter. Then next spring when the weather is warming up, you can take it out, plant it back in your garden bed or in a bigger container. Start watering and feeding and in no time it’s going to leafing.
That plant is going to put fruits on much faster than a seedling would and with a lot less work.
Final Thoughts
Growing peppers is a blast. They are hardy plants that bear fruit over and over every summer for years. If you heed this 10 mistakes so many of us make, you’ll have a great time and avoid working way too hard. So get out there and start planting and enjoying the wide variety of peppers readily available at your garden center.