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misc Increasing pepper production

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fern123

Hello users,
I have seen many videos of hot peppers on youtube , the healthy plants with thick stem and branches that bear 30-60 pods easily
Now when i grow them mine made 14 hardly, bought seeds on ebay
But another variety naga morich i bought from a reputed seller, it is forking naturally and has done it for 4 times if u understand , to put it each branch that forked forked once more and so on.
Now the stem is thick as a pencil. But most of the plants that i saw grew without forking and produced lots of peppers. I have horse and cow dung and using them as fertilizer.please tell me how to make my plants produce more.
 
Alot of the bigger plants have been overwintered and could be 2-3 years old. The more mature a plant is the more they produce. People use big containers or they are in the ground remember the bigger the root mass is the more foliage and pods it can produce. Really there is no magic production elixer. Just feed the plant right and give it time it will produce. As far as forking that's normal for most plants.
 
There are all sorts of factors that could cause your plants to produce less peppers.  However, from what you just said I think I can help identify a major issue.  Pepper plants do need nitrogen, but if they have access to too much nitrogen, they will tend to not produce peppers.  You say that you have horse and cow dung for fertilizer... well those both have extremely high nitrogen ratios.  Last year I had collected a couple truck loads of field-aged manure to mix into the garden.  However, i eneded up just piling it at the north end of the garden.  My garden rests on a slope, where the north end is higher than the south.  Therefore every time it rained the water would run through the manure heap and continue to the plants.  Those tomato and pepper plants on the north end of the garden were extremely lush and vigorous compared to the plants on the south end.  However... rofl... I harvested one tomato and two peppers from all of those huge plants that were adjacent to the manure heap.  Similary, this year I had one spot in my garden that I knew had a high concentration of manure from last year (except last year that spot wasnt used)... this year I have a black habanero planted in that spot.  This black habanero is currently over 7 feet tall (the largest pepper plant I have ever grown.)  Guess how many ripe peppers it has produced!?   Thats right... goose egg.  Guess how many pods are forming!? .... maybe 8
 
I have grown super hots for 5 years now. It first I just hoped to get a few pods per plant. The first year I did not know about topping and thought I killed 6 plants so I through them out of there pots on to a compost pile. Started new plant in side under lights. About a month later the almost dead
Plants started to live again to my surprise. I put the new plants out repotted the resurrected plant. April they all were out in the sun. The new plants had to be shaded(sun burn)(harden off). The almost dead plants grew like crazy. The new plants made a few pods(30) the resurrected plant 100 to 150 per plant. When they started flowering I stopped nitrogen use bat guano 0-10-0, soluble-mag/sulfer,cal/soluble k 0-0-44, with a worm tea(oxygen induced) once a month. Flowerimg goes crazy now. Over the years you learn start your plants, top them when they have there first v, use less water, feed them right. They will give back.
Tmudder has video that will help with soil, topping and care.
 
Where is "Fern"?  Location matters, for all I know you could live in the southern hemisphere and have young plants, or are up so far north that they barely had any warm weather and sun.
 
Cow and horse dung is not a very good fertilizer unless you till it into a lot of soil year after year, working the soil as a perpetual compost heap, and even then it works better if you grow a cover crop in the off season and till that in to keep up soil quality.
 
Ideally you would instead age that manure before using it.  The reason is not so much the fertilizer aspect but rather that peppers like light fluffy soil not soil that's mucky dense from fresh manure, it just compacts too much.
 
However we'd need a complete description of plant age, a soil composition description, temperature (both day and night), hours of sun, addt'l fertilizer used, watering schedule and amount, whether planted in ground or a pot and if pots what size they are, etc. etc.
 
It might also help to provide broad area pictures of the grow environment and individually of the plants.
 
Sorry dave this acc was only meant for giving a review of pepper lover.later i thought of using it for askin questions, so i am from india we dont have freezing temps here ,all year temp is above 20 deg celsius .and could you tell me mild what topping is and yes i used to watch tmudders reviews but now he only does his reviews of peppers and not update of his plants
Spitfireorganics also has geeat videos on youtube it still amazes me as to how he made his pepper plants so productive in the first year itself.and rebel grower 3, as you said larger containers help growth i dont think its correct as when i uprooted some of my plants from containers most of the roots were in the top 3" of soil , deeper very few roots were there.and noah if nitrogen is high then the plants must grow fast as you said but mine dont seem to grow that fast.
Thanks a lot people for your replies.
 
fern, I grow some fairly large plants and find that 5 gallon containers aren't large enough.  The roots on mine in larger containers go down at least 60 cm, all the way to the bottom of the tubs they're in, then the roots go sideways even further.    Granted I am not talking about thick roots that deep, they are more thin and hair-like after the first few inches of depth.
 
My first year plants don't only grow 30 - 60 pepper pods, I have plants currently 7 months old with over 300 peppers on them right now and I've already harvested hundreds per plant over the past 3 months.
 
I do have some in 5 gallon buckets and they are noticeably smaller as a result, AND they are more prone to breakage once a lot of peppers grow on the branches.
 
The only reasons roots wouldn't go further than 3" is either that the soil is too dense, or too damp and the roots are rotting away, or it's just that they are tiny plants. 
 
Linking some pictures of the plants might help, but if they are getting enough sun then I suspect the problem is your soil is too dense and mucky from the compost.  Try mixing some leaves, pine needles, moss, etc into the soil so it has a light, fluffy texture. 
 
When you transplant your small seedlings into it, the roots will grow into this fluffy dirt and keep it suspended instead of compacting too much when it is watered.  It is fairly important not to overwater the plants right after transplanting so the roots get a good structure, then for the rest of the season the soil remains fluffy meaning when you push on it, it feels sort of like a stiff sponge and bounces back.  This is not mandatory, but I think it helps my plants a lot and I have no desire to change my methods as they work well for me.
 
Topping potted plants Ive read is a good way to get new denser growth which in turn gives the plant more points at which it can push chilli. This is my first season growing chilli's. If amongst all my plants, I get 1 pod, I'd be pretty happy. Ive made alot of mistakes and learned from them.
 
All the seedlings I see on youtube and on here make my seedlings look miniscule. Its all a learning game.
 
It doesn't produce more pods except in short or poor growing environments.  It can get a first round of peppers to a little bit higher number in some cases but otherwise it may cost quite a few peppers over a season.
 
In other words it's more common to see people with only a few dozen per plant having a few dozen improvement from topping, while many people who don't top have hundreds of peppers per plant.
 
Dense isn't better by itself though a healthy plant may be dense too.   The ideal plant shape stretches out to catch as much sun as possible, sort of like an umbrella canopy though that canopy may droop some in shape once the weight of a lot of pods are on it.  There is an exception, in extremely hot/sunny climates that may be too much sun and a dense plant shading itself more has benefits, but there's still a benefit in having big leaves on top shading the peppers from sunburn.
 
Dave2000 said:
It doesn't produce more pods except in short or poor growing environments.  It can get a first round of peppers to a little bit higher number in some cases but otherwise it may cost quite a few peppers over a season.
 
In other words it's more common to see people with only a few dozen per plant having a few dozen improvement from topping, while many people who don't top have hundreds of peppers per plant..
Click to expand...
But without support do you think the plants will support themselves?
And also the big leaves , how do you get em so big?
Here in india the max leaf size is about quarter area of the palm, even if they become big they droop
Does it not depend on the parent plant characteristics ? I thought it might be so , btw its great that only a 7 month old plant is producing 100s
 
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