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Bhut Jolokia Pruning Experiment

Very interesting, thank you very much for posting this. I think this helps explain why the bishops crown that had frost damage and had to be cut back is lush and full of baby pods. While the one that didn't is tall and gangly, very few pods til this last week. I think I'll have to start cutting some back this next spring, because I haven't been doing so unless I had to.
 
I'd like to point out that pepper plants veg and fruit simultaneously. They can grow in both ways equally as fast if they are healthy. The experiment is nice. It really does need to be replicated to hold any validity other than: plants bush out when pruned. They are shorter but stockier and fuller. This could possibly accommodate more pods due to the plant being stocky and having the ability to hold more pods. Let's see if we can't get a bunch of us to try this experiment as well on multiple varieties. Good start though.
 
Experiments always need to be replicated in order to have validity, and I would love to see someone try the same thing. I wasn't a planned thing for me, and it wasn't for a particularly brutal hardening off for the plant where the bottom leaves on both ghosts were badly damaged I never would have thought to do it.
 
Jamison said:
x2 AJ

I always top, and prune. Bushier plants= more pods. Beautiful plants by the way.
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Thanks for the article Alabama Jack! I found it very interesting and informative. The thing that confuses me though is that the two plants have the same number of side shoots (which is a big part of the discussion in the article), they just look different.

Thank you Jamison! I love my plants this year, and I find the way the pods are growing in on the small bhut endlessly fascinating.
 
The link between nodes and pods is pretty direct. I guess the underlying question at the heart of it all, providing you like having lots of pods when it is time to harvest, is what leads to more nodes.
 
Figured I'd try my own little unscientific experiment. I've got a kung pao that just wasn't producing as well as I'd like, so I picked a couple of lower branches and clipped them off. Hopefully, the plant starts producing more pods as a result. It's got a couple on there now, hopefully it'll give some more. I'll try to get some pics up later.
 
Heres a couple pics or examples from this season. Topped, pruned, and a healthy prolific plant. All the same plant.

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Sorry for the out of sequence photo, but I managed to dig out a picture of the bhut that was pruned that was taken prior to the bottom leaves coming off. It shows how damaged my bhuts were after hardening off. This would have been taken at the end of May. At this point I was trying to figure out whether or not to snip them, and searching for answers is what led me to this forum.

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I did a "selective pruning" experiment on 2 overwintered TS plants last year after reading a research paper on pruning. The research was done on tomatoes plants and indicated that leaves over the size of a silver dollar where considered "sucker leaves" and will only reduce your overall harvest. As a result they should be selectively pruned from the plant allowing the plant to focus on the fruit and not the leaves once the plant starts fruiting.

I still to this day can't find the article online as it was a few years ago, but my testing was pretty impressive. The plant looked pretty sickly and skeletal at first, but WOW did they produce a ton of fruit. To this day I still prune all of the "sucker leaves" from my plants when they start fruiting.

Here is a link to the old post.

http://thehotpepper....periment-wpics/
 
This is just a mini update. One of the bhuts on the plant that was pruned in the spring started to ripen yesterday (pic taken this morning). No pods from the plant that was not pruned have started to turn.
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My plan is to put up three more posts before shutting down my pruning experiment and this thread. This post will give a quick update of how the two plants are looking, a mid-August post will track how many bhuts are coming off the plant, and a post when I am shutting down the garden in early September will give a final count of how each of the two plants did this summer.

Over the course of the past two weeks the bhut that was trimmed, which was larger, only grew a half an inch and is now 52.5 inches tall. This makes sense because it started to really pod up. The bhut that was pruned in the spring grew two inches in that same amount of time and in now an even 40 inches tall.
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The bhut that was trimmed has thicker stems. I apologize for the fact that it is difficult to get a picture that really shows how pronounced this difference is.
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Although the bhut that was trimmed in the spring is still a foot taller, the stems are thinner.
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The bhut that was trimmed has seven pods showing some amount of red.
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The larger bhut that was not trimmed has three pods showing orange, with none showing much red yet. They are on three different sides of the plant, so I could only get one full on with one blurry one in the background in a single shot.
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The bhut that was trimmed produced the first fully ripened pod, which I picked today. It was four inches long by my measurement, but there is curl at the end so in reality it may be a half an inch more than that if straightened out.
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There seems to be some difference in pod size, but I will not get into that until I have more measurements in a couple of weeks. Thanks as always for taking a look at my experiment!
 
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