I'm not sure where you are, but just yesterday our local Sam's Club had some fairly large, healthy looking pepper plants available. Loads of large tomato plants too. I figured they had to have been grown in a greenhouse or somewhere far south of here, because the tomatoes were about ten times the size of my tiny little transplants.

Well I do need a bale of toilet paper and another 5 gallons of cheese doodles so maybe I'll check it out.

Another pepper question, does allowing the fruit to mature thru color change slow done the prouction of new fruit? Or do they just going as along as conditions are right.

I leave the early buds and flowers on and it does not seem to impair my plants' production. That might be true in a milder climate, but in our hot climate, pepper plants grow like mad in May and June and set flowers and fruit galore. I hate to remove any, especially on sweet peppers, because there's a point where the hot temperatures are so bad that it can impede pollination (this is more common with sweet peppers than hot ones) and I'd hate to have removed early blooms/fruit and then have a heat wave prevent more from forming.

Leaving green peppers on the plants to turn their mature color might slow down follow-on blooms a little, but I don't care. I leave them on to mature to their full ripe color anyway because they are so much tastieer when matur. I don't pick tomatoes (except GWR types) or peaches or plums and eat them green, and I'm not going to pick bell peppers and eat them green either. With jalapenos, I pick some green, especially for canning, and let the others mature to red.

The only thing about letting peppers mature to their full ripe color is that they have a shorter shelf life so you have to eat them, freeze them or can them pretty quickly after harvesting them.

The practice of picking peppers green and shipping them is one employed by commercial agriculture for monetary reasons. Letting the peppers ripen gives you a much better-flavored product and is one of the advantages of raising your own.

I plant a lot of peppers and get both early production and huge production. If you plant them into well-prepared soil and keep them properly watered, peppers produce like mad here. They are one of the easiest things to grow as long as you don't buy transplants infected with viruses.

We like peppers ripe and green, we eat more green. Even tho the ripe taste better I remove a lot of green to keep from over loading the plant and it seems to encourage more production.

I grow very few hot peppers, I am just not man enough to eat them.

Larry

Dawn,

I know you swear by tomato tone for preparing the soil for tomatoes, is there a similar product or method you like for preparing the soil for peppers?

Kelly