The big pepper growing experiment: will I change how I do things?

This year we’ve had two experiments going in the garden, the first one being the tomatoes that are growing outdoors and the second the peppers in the greenhouse. The pepper experiment is actually a bit more complicated and has a few variables so if you haven’t been following along, let me explain.

Last September when I cleared out the greenhouse, I decided that instead of chopping up the old pepper plants and composting them, I’d have a go at keeping them alive over winter in the hope of getting a jump start on this season.

That was part one and if you missed all of this fun, I’ll link some of the previous videos below for you to catch up.

This experiment then led to another, when early in spring when I was growing this years seedlings I talked about how it’s quite common to pinch out the growing tip (called topping), and apparently this makes a healthier plant and gives you bigger harvest. But… I’d also saw someone else saying that they’d found that this could also be detrimental and give you smaller fruit.

So I decided since I had 4 plants, I’d pinch the growing tips from 2 and leave two so that we could compare the results.

Fast forward and it’s now July, and we have plenty of peppers, so what do we find, was it a good idea to overwinter my pepper plants? Does punching out he growing tip give you more fruit? Does it reduce the size of the fruit?

Let’s find out.

If you haven’t caught up with the previous episodes on this experiment yet, the video links are below.

We have actually concluded this experiment since this post was first published. Find the final part of this series below.
The big pepper experiment results.