Pepper cage/support ideas
Donald V Zone 6 north Ohio
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cindy-6b/7a VA
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Do you cage or stake your peppers?
Comments (3)Hi Mark, With peppers, staking or caging is optional. A lot of people do not stake or cage their peppers and the plants do perfectly well. It is probably a matter of personal preference more than anything else, unless you live in a high-wind area and/or your garden site is pretty exposed to the elements. In making the decision about whether to cage or stake peppers, I consider the usual mature size of the plant for me in my garden. If the plant gets over 18" tall, and most do, I will stake it, using wooden stakes and zip-ties or the green velcro plant ties available in a roll at some nurseries or big box home building supply stores. If the plants get over about 24" to 28" tall, I will cage them using small cages about 2' tall. If the plants get over 36" tall, I will cage them inside one of the smaller tomato cages I have made from wire fencing. There aren't many pepper plants that get 3' tall or taller, but there are a few. The main argument for either staking or caging has more to do with how brittle the plants themselves are. We get a lot of strong south and west winds in our part of the state during the summer, especially with severe thunderstorms. When a pepper plant that is loaded with almost full-sized sweet bell peppers starts blowing during those strong winds, the limbs can snap off quite easily. Of secondary concern to me is the need to protect my peppers from sunscald. If your pepper plants get more than 6 hours of sun a day (most of mine get at least 8 to 10), you may have blistering or sunscald of any part of the peppers exposed to direct sunlight for most of the day. In a perfect world, the pepper foliage would cover most of the peppers and keep this from occurring, but that tends not to happen. I have found that pepper plants in cages tend to stay a little more 'bunched up' which helps keep the foliage over the peppers, protecting them from some of the sunlight at least. Pepper plants that aren't caged or staked tend to sprawl A LITTLE BIT, but that little bit is often enough to allow the fruit to burn and blister. It seems like more of a problem on sweet peppers than on hot ones, perhaps because of the larger size of the fruit. In times of extremely brutal sunlight (say about mid to late-July to mid-August) , I can attach either sheets of newspaper or pieces of shade cloth, whichever is available, to the tops of the cages, or to the west or southwest side of the cages, to provide shading if sunscald is still a problem. I generally use clothespins to attach the paper or cloth to the cage. (If sunscald becomes a problem on tomato plants, you can protect them in the same way.) A third consideration is whether any wild or domestic animals or young children will be wandering around in the garden. My cats are in the garden a lot and the dogs are allowed in every now and then. At this point in time there are few young children wandering through the garden since my DS is grown up, but sometimes the children of friends and neighbors are around. Before the garden was completely fenced it, it was common to have armadillos, possums, etc. roaming around it at night. If you are going to have a lot of animals/young children walking through the garden, staking or caging helps protect the plants. It doesn't take much effort for a foraging animal, or an excited dog, or two fighting cats, to snap a branch or two off a pepper plant. So, there you have it--some of the reasons you might want to cage or stake. After considering the degree of wind movement and hours of sun exposture in your garden as well as whether or not your plants might be bumped/trampled, you can decide what is best for you and your garden. I hope this info is helpful and I hope that your garden is growing well. Happy Growing! Dawn...See Morebell peppers in tomate cages?
Comments (6)I use those cheap, small 3-ring tomatoes cages they sell for a couple of bucks each. The ones I have are maybe 3' tall. These cages are not at all large enough to support indeterminate tomato plants but they are great for most pepper plants. For the kinds of pepper plants that get really tall, like ancho gigantea, (which hit 5' tall and 4' wide in my garden last year) I use regular home-made tomato cages but I generally cut them in half, height-wise, so they are only 3-4' tall instead of the 7-8' tall ones I use for tomatoes. I grow a lot of pepper plants for canning and in order to share peppers with our friends, so I don't have enough cages for all of them. Once I run out of cages, I stake the plants with a stake hammered into the ground near the plants on the same day they are planted. (Coming back and hammering in a stake later on can damage the roots.) With the staked ones I space them only 15-18" apart at planting time, which means they sort of grow into a hedge of intermingled , staked plants that help hold each other up....See MoreSupport - tomatoes, eggplant, peppers
Comments (11)For tomatoes I use four 6' stakes pounded into the ground about a foot around each plant, and then I "cage" the vines by tying twine around the stakes every 8-10" as they grow. I try to keep "ahead" of the tomatoes, 'cause it's MUCH easier to tie the twine around the stakes when you're not trying to "contain" the vines while you're tying! I started out using mostly 6' bamboo stakes since they were the cheapest thing I could get, but over the years I've gradually been replacing them with the vinyl-coated metal stakes. Because of my very limited space I MUST grow them up! For the "regular" tomatoes 5' is usually high enough, but the cherries grow over the top and just hang after that, and some years they hang most of the way back down to the ground! With the four stakes they're pretty sturdily supported, but some years I do have to pound a T-post in next to the cherry tomato cages and tie the stakes to that to keep them from flopping over! For the eggplant I put one good solid stake in by each plant and just tie the main stem as they grow so they can support the weight of the fruit. The only peppers I grow are a couple paprika peppers, but I usually wind up eventually supporting them the same way I do the eggplant. Here are some pics that show how I do it--from beginning to end. (I don't have any serious Wind Issues with the fence, the shed, and the house blocking enough of it!) 07.01.12 - About two weeks after I planted them - The stakes are in but no twine yet 07.10.12 - I tied the twine around the stakes high enough that it's above the current growth 08.06.12 - Everything's pretty much full grown, but nothing's flopping over the top yet 09.31.12 - From the other side where you can see how high they are relative to the 6' fence, and the cherries, on the left, are totally flopping! I wound up with three "extra" tomatoes this year and didn't have anything planted where my root crops normally go, so I stuck the extra three in there and just let them flop--the way we always grew them at home--when we had a couple acres to let them flop on!!! I tried "regular" tomato cages the first couple years! They're a JOKE! Skybird P.S. If you want to see anything close up, click on the pic and then you can magnify it by clicking on the little magnifier on top of the pic! This post was edited by skybird on Tue, Apr 22, 14 at 1:03...See MoreHow To Support Pepper Plants
Comments (11)I like the free bamboo. My wife works for a property mgmnt. company. One of the rental properties they manage was infested with bamboo. There was nowhere to walk in the back yard at all. I had to use a chain saw to cut though a path. It was so dense I was not going to overwork myself with a machete cutting it out. The house had been vacant for a long time, and the previous owner had planted them. Then the property was vacant for 4 years. No one ever cut the back yard. The neighbor would cut the front lawn when they mowed their own. So it took over the yard. I have quite a few of the poles left from last year to last me though. I got to keep all I wanted. This year if I want some I am sure the property owner will be more than happy to let me clear it out again....See Moredaninthedirt (USDA 9a, HZ9, CentTX, Sunset z30, Cfa)
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