Having a fruit and veggie garden is a great way to regulate what you put in your mouth and feed to your family. However, growing organic food is all fun and games until your produce doesn’t turn out as robust as you had hoped. Bell peppers are one of the most popular fruits grown in home gardens, and they can get pretty large and sumptuous. Harvesting a bunch of small peppers can be a bit of a downer, especially if you did everything right with fertilizing and watering the plants. If you are tired of raking in itty-bitty peppers and want to see them in size grande, then you have to try this TikTok hack posted by gardener Calvin of Geeky Greenhouse. In short, to get larger peppers, the weakest links need to be pruned off.
According to the TikTok gardener, survival of the fittest is the name of the game in the bell pepper world. The pepper fruits on a plant tend to compete with one another. When there are a multitude of fruits on a plant, there will be serious resource allocation so all the bells get fed. By plucking off some of the weaker or smallest ones and leaving the ones with the most potential, you can trick the plant into diverting those nutrients toward the remaining fruit, so they grow into sizable bells. According to observations published by the University of Delaware, this practice is justified.
Leave up to ten pepper fruits per plant
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♬ original sound – Geeky Greenhouse
The task is straightforward — remove most of the smaller bell peppers that you feel won’t reach a desirable size. In the video, Calvin clears out the pepper plant and leaves about six to ten peppers to flourish without any competition. To do this properly, just yank the smaller fruit by its stalk off the main stem. You don’t need any gardening tools for this hack, just a sharp eye and an intuitive mind to know which peppers make the cut and which get the boot. Once harvest season rolls in, you should see the chosen peppers fattened up and ready for picking.
If you have a hard time deciding which peppers should be plucked and which should be left on the plant, you can keep an eye out for ones that are deformed. A strange-looking fruit will keep looking strange as it grows. Peppers that are stunted should also get evicted. They likely won’t grow very large anyway. Also, fruits that have ripened prematurely need to go. The sooner you do this, the better because you will be making room for stronger, healthier pepper fruits to emerge.
Your plant size and climate will determine yield size
The size of your bell pepper plant is directly proportional to the size of your harvest. If you are growing your peppers in a pot, you have to make sure that pot is large enough to contain the root spread, as TikTok garden creator Calvin points out in his comment section. He explains that for your pot to be sufficient, it should easily contain 5 to 10 gallons of soil. The creator also notes that, from his experience, the peppers do better when allowed to grow without ceasing which would mean growing directly from seed.
Bell peppers prefer warm temperatures so living in a cold region may affect the size of the fruit you see during the harvest period. The plants thrive in soil with a temperature ranging from 65 to 70 degrees Fahrenheit. The TikTok creator duo Geeky Greenhouse gardens is in hardiness zone 6a which sees a temperate climate with chilly winters and hot summers.
The way you care for and maintain your pepper plants plays a significant role in their nutritional process. Bell peppers need at least six hours of sunlight every day and love nutrient-packed soil, so fertilizer is key. One common mistake people make when growing peppers is huddling the plants together. This leads to competition within the garden and reduces the size of your harvest. So make sure you space the pepper plants out far enough during planting season.
