When to Pick Green Peppers: Size, Frequency and Why They Turn Red

Pick young, and pick often

This type is eaten immature. The pod you want is a hand's length or less, glossy, mid green, and thin enough in the wall that it bends slightly rather than snapping when you squeeze it. That state arrives roughly two weeks after the flower opens, and it lasts about four or five days before the pod starts going the wrong way.

Which is why the picking interval is the whole discipline. Go over the plant every two or three days through the main season. Once a week is not enough: half of what you find will already be past its best, and the plant will have slowed down while you were away.

If in doubt, pick. An extra day on the plant gains you almost nothing in size and costs you tenderness, whereas the pod in the kitchen is the one you actually eat.

What happens when you leave a pod on

Two things go wrong at once, and they compound. Inside the pod, the wall lignifies, the skin thickens into something that catches in your teeth, and the seeds harden and turn from a soft mass into a papery core that has to be scraped out. That process is not reversible.

Meanwhile the plant reads a maturing pod as a completed seed and shifts resources into finishing it. Flower production drops within days. Three or four mature pods left hanging across a plant will cut new flowering to almost nothing, and the plant sits idle for two or three weeks until you clear them. This is by far the most common reason a plant that started well stops producing in midsummer.

1. Clear every mature pod at once If the plant has stalled, go through it and take everything full sized, whatever the color, even the ones you do not want to eat. Compost the tough ones. The point is to remove the signal, not to salvage the pod.
2. Water and feed the same day A stalled plant that is suddenly cleared restarts fast if it has something to restart on. Give it a full watering and a potassium weighted feed at normal strength.
3. Expect flowers within ten days New flower buds appear within a week to ten days and the first new pods are pickable about two weeks after that. It genuinely does work, and it works more than once in a season.
4. Then hold the interval Set a fixed pattern you can keep, such as every Tuesday and Saturday. The plant responds to consistency far more than to any amount of feeding.

Why some pods go red, and what to do about it

Green is not a color this pepper stays. Any pod left long enough will ripen, usually to red, sometimes through an orange or streaked stage on the way. This is not a fault and it is not a different plant; it is the same pod finishing what it was always going to do.

A red pod of this type is sweet and quite good to eat, but the wall has softened and the skin has toughened, so it is a different thing from what you grew it for. More importantly, a plant carrying ripening pods is a plant that has finished flowering for the season, which is why you only want this deliberately and only at the very end.

Deliberately ripening a few pods at the very end of the season is worth doing. They dry well, and the flavor is nothing like the green pod.

How to take a pod off without breaking the plant

The stalk of this type is fibrous and firmly attached, and the branch behind it is brittle. Pulling gives you a snapped fork about one time in ten, and each snapped fork is several weeks of production gone. Snips are not optional on this crop.

1. Support the branch with your free hand Hold the branch just behind the pod so the cutting hand is not levering against unsupported brittle wood.
2. Cut the stalk, leaving a short stub Snip through the stalk about a quarter inch (6 mm) above the pod. A short stub keeps the pod sealed and stops rot getting in during storage.
3. Work from the outside inward Take the easy outer pods first, then part the foliage and look inside the bush. The pods you miss are almost always the inner ones, and those are the ones that go tough.
4. Check the underside of every branch A surprising number hang directly under a leaf. Crouch and look up through the plant once at the end of each pick.

Yield, storage and the end of the season

A single well kept plant produces fifty to eighty pods over a four month season, and two or three plants feed most households heavily. People routinely plant six and then cannot keep up with the picking, which is what causes the stalling in the first place.

Pods keep about a week in a bag in the refrigerator, and they are much better if picked dry and not washed until you use them. They freeze well sliced and raw with no blanching, and this is the honest answer to a summer glut. At the very end of the season, once nights are dropping below 50F (10C), pick everything left whatever the size and let the last few color indoors.

Keep a rough tally of pods picked per plant per week. It is the most useful number in the whole crop, because it tells you exactly when the plant stalled and how quickly clearing it recovered production.