Because I know someone will ask, so I copied and pasted this from my site.
Why do we strip plants?
Hello everyone.
This is our 36th year for growing hot peppers, it is difficult to comprehend the
advancements made and varieties that are now available in the chili world.
Keep in mind the pepper plants are perennials but most of us grow them as annuals.
Our growing season here in Wisconsin is short, right around 90 to 100 days from frost to frost.
Here at Jeff's Dried Hot Peppers we grow for fruit and not for foliage and plant size.
For the last 25 years we have been denuding our plants for a number of weeks
allowing our plants to become strong and healthy before pod production and by denuding
(picking the buds) we have found in many trials that fruit production has gone up by
3 to 10 fold depending upon the variety.
Disaster and Surprise.
We start our plants from seed under florescent lights; anywhere from the middle of
January on, many of varieties require a longer growing season. When the plants become
large enough (4 or more sets of true leaves) we move them to the greenhouse where
they will become somewhat hardened off by temperature changes and sun light.
At the end of April 2012 we had 5,000 plus super hot peppers freeze in the greenhouse
do to unfortunate miscalculation in temperature, most where a total loose, a few
survived but all of the leaves were gone and for the most part looked like a pencil
stuck in the dirt. To our surprise the secondary limbs started growing and within
3 weeks were nice health bushes. Not knowing how these would grow or produce
we planted them just for kick; not really expecting them to do anything.
Wrong!!
These plant flourished and surpassed our normal denuded plants in both foliage
and production and also these disaster plants never got denuded.
Keep in mind that that these plants have been picked a minimum
of 3 time and this is just what is left for final harvest.
So this year we will be striping our plants on purpose, denuding takes some serious
time when you grow thousands of plants but it only takes a few seconds to cut the foliage
off the plants. The plants you see in the pics below are younger then the plants that froze
and is just and experiment, we left some leaves at the top so we can get another 1 or 2 sets
of true leaves before we top them.
I will update this as things progress and will be holding off on cutting anymore until the
results are in.
Under no circumstances are we suggesting that you do this or any other method
mentioned here.
Thank you all for stopping by and wish you the best of luck for this years grow!!
Cheers - Jeff
