Hello People, Newb here posting on the site but have been on here reading very good info and been growing peppers for years . Have been reading about topping your plants for bigger pod yield and thought i would try this on some goats weed i grew this year. Has anyone tried this before with this piticular pepper? Mine didint seem to like it, it just wanted to keep growing straight up like its supposed to(tree like). I topped it and it sprouted right next to my cut and kept growing straight up. a few other branches sprouted but not like the main one. im kind of thinking i should let it be the tree it wants to be and not top this pepper.
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Goat's weed topping
- Thread starter rickvm
- Start date
Two years ago I topped a bahamian goat pepper and it did the same thing. I felt bad actually. Don't know if I did it wrong or too late or what, but that plant never did seem to grow like it looked like it would prior to my botched top attempt. I chalked it up to doing it wrong and haven't topped a plant since. YMMV. 
Yeah, i feel bad also for topping. I planted quite a few this year (about 80) to fill up a planter i have, why not? lol , I was running out of dried peppers for my salsas so i needed to restock. They seem to be watching each other to see who is the tallest and then you just cut them in half, heart breaking!! i will read up on the low stress training and might give that a try.
nonsense! Top that sombitch and top it again and again, teach it not to grow like a stick. Its a lil' late in the season for topping though. I've been growing goatsweeds for 6 or 7 years. There many variations and pheno's of goatsweed out there but mine grow like a stick if I don't top them. There is only two strains in my pepper stable I believe in topping, one is goatsweed and the other is onza amarillo (very similar structure).
But it must be done right and in the plants youth.
But it must be done right and in the plants youth.
well i guess ill give it a try next year on a few and see what happens. i got a late start this year and dont want to chop anymore this late in the season. they just started flowering. they are healthy and strong and growing, well like weeds. A little history. My dad got these peppers from a friend about 30 yrs ago. He really liked them fresh and gave some to my mom to make some salsa. well my dad started growing them and been giving them to friends and family ever since. I guess the tradition got passed on to me, but i really enjoy it. wow, 30 generation of the same pepper strain. a few hybrids here and there and still have them, maybe next year ill grow some out.
rickvm said:
I am growing my Black Cobra, aka Goats Weed for the second time this year. I topped one, one year, and did not top the other in a consecutive year, so no side-by-side comparison. But I can say that the plant that was topped tended to put more of its effort into a primary branch, even when topped, whereas other varieties of peppers don't usually have so much focus on a single branch once topped.
My suggestion with Goats Weed in, particualr to topping or not, would be to let it grow naturally. It should be a very beautiful plant in the end. I have a very few piucs in my GLOG which the link is in my sig, if you're interested. Pics of this year's plant only, though... sorry.