How Can I Grow More Peppers? Remove Flower Buds

There’s one method for gardening success that is completely counterintuitive to me: cut to promote growth. In many cases, if you make a cut in a plant’s branch, you promote more growth or flowering in that spot. This applies to a lot of succulents, trees and, as it turns out, vegetables.

Here’s some advice I found on peppers:

“Removing all flower buds until our pepper plants grow taller than their cages.. Reason for this is when you remove the flower buds it promotes vegetative growth within the plant and allows your pepper plants to grow big enough to support and push out a ton of fruit! If you let your pepper plants flower out at this small size it will stunt your pepper plants and you will harvest a quarter of what that plant was capable of! Last year I let my plants to grow 3 1/2 feet tall before allowing them to flower out and I harvested hundreds upon hundreds of peppers last year! When you remove one bud it encourages two or more to grow in its spot!” Tip from @theurbanladybug

A photo posted by Gardening Tips (@gardeningtips) on Mar 28, 2016 at 10:41pm PDT

My instinct tell me to cut when something’s dead or headed that way. And removing buds? The same buds that I’ve been waiting to see since March? Aaaarrgh!

OK, I did it. Here’s my version of exactly the same shot. We’ll see how it goes.

Pulled those pepper buds!