2021 Pepper Season Garden Maintenance
It’s been a good while since the last garden update. The plants are thriving, producing lots and lots of peppers for me to pick. As fruitful as the season has been, however, I have been neglecting the plants in terms of up-keep and maintenance. Life has a way of occupying your time.
This past weekend, I was able to dedicate some much needed time to the pepper plants and address some serious issues with over growing, entanglement and weather damage. We’ve had a ton of rain the past few weeks and the weight of ripening fruit and water has been too much for a few of the plants, snapping branches as a result.
As you can see by the series of photos below, my plants are entwined amongst one another and overflowing out of the raised beds. I’m happy to see such growth, but it’s nearly impossible to access some of the plants on the far sides of the beds. The Tshololo pepper plant has spread so much, that it’s growth radius is probably 6-7 feet around and has limited the development of plants around it.
It’s always painful cutting back healthy plants, but sometimes these things just need to be done for the betterment of the plant’s future, as well as those plants around it. I have a couple of plants (my Aji Mochero is incredibly small by comparison) that are suffering in terms of growth and air flow as a result of the size of others. It sucks to lose some unripened fruit at this point in the season, but I know a healthy plant will continue to produce well into November in my zone.
As you can see below, I can now access the full perimeter of the raised beds with relative ease. None of the plants that have been chopped back have been hurt too badly in the process and will continue to grow for the rest of the season.
That’s it for now. Happy gardening!