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pics Selective pruning to increase crop experiment w/pics

I setup an earthbox last year for the upstairs patio and placed 2 TS and had a pretty good harvest, but I noticed the plants where more bush then fruit. Since the plants grew to a good size I decided to just overwinter them directly in the box instead of planting TS seeds this year. I cut back the plants and put it in the garage for a few months giving it an occasional day or 2 in the sun when it was warm. Well early this year It started to grow back slowly, but instead of letting it grow a ton of leaves and shoots I decided to do some "Selective Pruning" to try and increase this years harvest based on a article I read a while back.

I can't recall where I read it, but there where some test done tomato plants that showed decreasing the amount of foliage will actually increase the amount of fruit in tomoto plants. Basically the article said to only allow stems and vines to grow as normal, but to prune back about 50% of it's leaves during the growing stage. Once your plant is in the flowering phase your suppose to trim all, but around 20% of the plants foliage so it can again focus on flowering and fruiting not foliage.

The theory seems to make sense as you want the plant to produce fruit not NOT foliage. I recall reading that the flowers, stems, and fruit will act as foliage for the plants photosynthesis and maintain the plants ability to grow so your not preventing the plant from growing your just forcing it to use it's energy to grow fruit and not foliage.

Well my Earthbox and 2 plants have been outdoors and slowly growing back since mid Feb and it started flowering about 4 weeks ago. Per the article I stripped it of all, but about 20% of it's leaves and since it's been a bit cold (actually slight rain this week). I also gave it weekly foliar feedings of 2-6-6 fertilizer and a weekly dose of worm tea to help it focus on fruiting. Since I prefer to foliar feed my plants I don't need a high rated fert as the plant is suppose to intake 30-50% more of the ferts and 40-70% faster. I decided to bring it back inside last week due to the cold weather and put it under a 400 watt HPS full spectrum light to give it a bit of a jump on the grow season.

The plant doesn't look like much as it seems to be a skeleton of a normal plant, but WOW I couldn't imagine how many stems, flowers, and fruit in just about every branch it can find. Each node seems to have around 5 flowers and they are packed in tight. It's funny to see because where there used to be stems and foilage there is just a node of pepper now. It seems like the ferts and the HPS light is forcing the plant to grow back stems and not foilage where it normally would have. I'm really surprised to such pathetic looking plants with so many nodes. I counted about 500 nodes between the 2 plants already and the fruit seem to be growing a lot faster as well.

Not sure if this type of excessive fruiting is normal or not since the plant is overwintered, but I have never had any of my plants show that many nodes before even the ones I overwintered last year. Here are some pics of week 4 since it started flowering last month.
 
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Wow, that is awesome. Its crazy there are so many clusters of buds close together. I have a bhut jolokia in my aerogarden at work and i'm doing alot of pruning too to keep it short and bushy. Right now its just leaves, but once it starts to flower, i may try this technique. thanks for the info.
 
I wonder if having so many fruits will make the peppers smaller overall. I thin the fruit early on my peach and pomegranate trees to make the remaining fruits grow bigger. It will be neat to see what happens.
 
That plant looks dangerous. You better watch where you are snipping on that thing, it may snip back. Are you sure you didn't grow a maple tree or something?
 
Last spring I read an article somewhere that gave the same advice. My wife and I were pruning our plants constantly. Every once in a while we would run across some that were very stubborn and didn't want to flower. We cut the leaves back daily until it finally diverted its resources to producing flowers. It really works and I wouldn't hesitate for a minute on doing it again!!
 
I wonder if having so many fruits will make the peppers smaller overall. I thin the fruit early on my peach and pomegranate trees to make the remaining fruits grow bigger. It will be neat to see what happens.

I never thought about that. I did notice a few of the really early peppers being undersized, but that was 3 weeks ago before I started fertilizing for fruit and before I put it under the HPS lamp. I did look at the size of the green peppers on the plant now and they do look normal to large in size already so I'm hoping they all grow to that size. I did notice about 10 flowers that dropped, but out of the amount of flowers still on the plant I would say that's normal.

I know they will have heat because I lost one medium sized green pepper during the move to the garage so I decided to eat it to test the heat level and they will be hot for sure. This one even green did pack a nice amount of heat already.
 
Last spring I read an article somewhere that gave the same advice. My wife and I were pruning our plants constantly. Every once in a while we would run across some that were very stubborn and didn't want to flower. We cut the leaves back daily until it finally diverted its resources to producing flowers. It really works and I wouldn't hesitate for a minute on doing it again!!

How aggressive where you when you pruned the plant? I couldn't believe it when the article suggested 80% of the plants leaves be removed, but I followed the advice and although my plant does look like a maple tree it seems to be doing fine. I guess the theory of using the fruit as flowers explains that.

How was your yield in comparison to the ones you didn't prune? My one and only goal is of course MAXIMUM YIELD so i'm always looking for the next scientific approach to increasing my overall output.

I'll try and get weekly pics posted for those following the experiment.
 
First let me say that our approach was more of a reactive than proactive. We would first determine the plants overall growth development, such that is it where it should be or is it under performing. For the plants that were up to par they receive a typical light pruning that would consist of picking off all the sucker leaves. Now for the plants that were under performing they would receive a pruning of least 50% or more of all the leaves removed. It seem that the potted plants received more attention than the ones planted in the ground, thus had better yields. Keep in mind that the best plants were selected for the pots!

The sweet peppers received the least amount of attention, thus only being pruned about every 10 days or more and stripping 50% of all the leaves. We always targeted the biggest leaves while passing on the smaller ones. I am convinced that a good pruning regiment effects plant growth and production. The more attention they received the better they performed. When you're working with 500 plus plants it seems at times impossible to maintain. Watering and fertilizing is the easy part while pruning is where the real work is.

I sense that you might be looking at bringing this up to the next stage, thereby taking a more proactive approach.
 
thanks for all the pictures

it is very interesting the pruning for yield concept please keep us in on it
(are you growing a control plant? to compare) :crazy:
one thing,
you have all these macro pics posted in here and
you start to discuss about size of this and that as normal or
small and the like.

please at some point put something that has a "known" size (like a ruler or coin)
into some pics of something before discussing it having size abnormalities and such
i know it is really difficult to shoot good pics and upload them and all

and i like your pics a whole bunch :woohoo:
i know i have trouble even uploading the damn things from either my POS computer or my slow connection(s)
 
I sense that you might be looking at bringing this up to the next stage, thereby taking a more proactive approach.

Well my one and only goal as always is to produce MORE fruit at any cost. In the past I would almost never prune my plants unless I noticed a over sized leaf shading the lower leaves or a leaf that was dying or sun burnt. I figured the more leave the better which is great if my goal was to grow leaves. My only guess is very few do any type of pruning based on the fact that it's extremely time consuming (I know I wouldn't bother if I had 500 plants to tend to).

However after reading the article it just made sense. I will be pruning all my plants this year, but the only reason I started with these is because they started flowering a month or so ago after being over wintered. I did notice a LOT more growth on the lower shoots and bottom of the plant since it's not so full at the top and forced to shade the bottom. I think that is yet another helpful benefit of this experiment. In the past I tried to tie down some of the wider stalks so the lower leaves would get more sun, but it only helped slightly. With this plant I was shocked to see fruit coming off the main stalk directly and not just 1, but several nodes!
 
I took more pics today, but after I read this post so I didn't put in a soda can or anything as a size reference. However the size of the earth box is 29″ L x 13.5″ D x 11″ H so that should give you some indication as to how big the plants are. They don't look like much without any leaves, but the large one is about 4' WIDE from the longest branches on the side and about 3' tall from the top of the earth box.

I don't have a control plant to compare to since both the plants where over wintered and my new plants are no where near that size yet. I noticed some flower drop after moving it back inside and putting it under the HPS light and I had some problems keeping the garage cool so I moved it back to the patio where it will stay for the rest of the year since it's a LOT hotter now.

Although I dropped some flowers it's still growing steady and now that it's back outside it put on a LOT of leaves in a week. Several pods have ripped and most are average in size, but a few are grunts that didn't grow to full size before ripening. It seems like all the green ones are full sized now. I think the small ones are a result of cold weather and rains a couple of weeks ago.

Enjoy the pics.

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wow, those sure are pretty plants

i am hoping some potted ups i have now will be able to "sleep in"

this winter. also thanks for a size reference :woohoo:

the tomato prune the heck out of it theory sounds

probably from "kacper p." in hawaii

he also advocates the beneficial microbes
 
It looks like soon you'll be picking fresh scorps – ya-baby!!

I will defiantly follow your experiment this season! I think overall this will put some scientific perspective to the process. Later in the season when my wife and I begin our pruning regiment I'll post some pics on your link if you don't mind...just to compare notes. I think this indeed is an awesome project and is worth the effort!!

Jack
 
Ok I picked 2 ripe medium sized peppers off the left plant that had a ton of heat and taste great. However I did noticed 3 dwarf peppers that started to rippen too soon so I pulled them off the plants. Not sure how old the dwarfs where, but I did have a bit of rain and cold that forced the plant back in the garage under the HPS light so i'm hoping that's just a side effect of either the cold or the transition to the light out of the cold to a much hotter enviornment or if it's just early peppers not fully developing.

The plant did have a small amount of flower drop, but there are now 10+ medium to large green peppers on the plant so hopefully it's just gearing up for a long productive season!

Feel free to post pics here as well if you like.
 
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