# 3 I'd say is contested. Whenever I've picked peppers from plants, they end up producing a LOT more peppers. Whenever I've left them on, the plants stagnate and the most I get are riper, more colorful, hotter peppers.
I don't think fruit photosynthesizes. And the peppers have to be maintained by the plant. You pull peppers, it frees up more nodes and resources so the plant can grow more. From what I've seen, it'll at least replace the peppers you pick if not double or triple its output.
There's either a new node to grow a pepper(s) already grown or there isn't. There's nothing to free up since another bud isn't going to be set on the same node the large pod came from, and the resources would only be a small amount of water the plant continues to supply as once a pepper is full sized it is an already present enzyme, not any action on the plant's part that finishes the job.
I have not seen peppers double or triple their output at all if contrasting picking a pepper when full sized but unripe versus full sized and ripe. However I have seen faster sets of new blooms if the peppers were picked before they were full sized so the energy that was being used to grow them is diverted to growing a new node faster.
Another thing is, you have to understand how the plant operates. Seeds from unripe peppers aren't viable. The plant's goal is to reproduce so it can only do that by producing ripe peppers. You pull all its peppers, it'll make more and a greater quantity to increase the chances more will make it to maturity.
Seeds from full sized peppers are viable before ripe. Ripening is a sign that the fruit has reached full size for certain.
Heat is dependent on how mature the pepper is. Fruits turn red/orange/yellow etc to attract birds, which are the natural distributors of pepper seeds. Beaks and avian guts* don't destroy the peppers like a mammalian gut, the heat is actually to deter mammals from eating them, birds can't actually feel capcaicin. Anyways my point is, the longer you leave peppers on the plant the hotter and more flavorable they become.
Do you have any references to support that capsaicin is produced by the ripening process? If not, then it follows that it is letting a pepper get to full size, not the subsequent ripening that determines the heat level, although since a peper changes in texture during ripening it could taste hotter with a more rapid delivery of the capsaicin to the mouth of the person eating it.
Peppers don't turn ripe to attract birds, that would be a biologically active decision. The plant has no say over it and this is just an evolutionary thing that plants that were most likely to survive were those the birds found and those the birds found were the ones a different color than the surrounding plant tissue. The heat is not to deter mammals from eating them, again the plant has no conscious decision about it and other plants do not use this survival mechanism and further, "most" mammals don't have a digestive tract that will break down pepper seeds. So yes what you describe is what ends up happening regarding birds eating them but there are a lot of other things birds would rather eat.
So I usually harvest them before they're really ripe, but after they've matured enough to develop some flavor. You get the hang of it after a while. If you wait until they're ripe, early in the season you'll barely get any peppers. They don't really ripen fast until Aug/Sept/Oct. I like having peppers to eat all the time, and I don't like having many go to waste.
Maybe we're just growing different types of peppers. Most of my plants have full sized unripe peppers on them but none have now been producing nodes and blooms at a slower rate than expected. On the contrary it seems as though each new node being a fork from the last, that with each passing week there are twice as many blooms as the prior week or more (it gets hard to count after a while). Maybe it's a fertilizer or water thing, I don't withhold very much of either. They certainly are not lacking in blooms at all with between dozens and hundreds of full sized pods waiting to ripen.
I'm not here to argue, my main point is I don't feel that plants make advanced decisions about what to do, and that I don't have plants that stop producing new blooms because they already have fruit on them. I've read claims that this happens enough times that I was convinced it is true but through observation, that's not what my plants have done season after season.
