Clearing out your Peppers also cleans your garden bed and gives you the opportunity to plant something else in its place. This will remove the entirety of your Peppers’s above ground structure, which will wither and die as the cold weather approaches. With that being the case, you are not free to cut down your Peppers at its base. After harvest, your Peppers will have reached the end of its life cycle. Once the peppers are fully mature, you can harvest them and use them as you please in your kitchen. A feeding of fertilizer can more than make up for removing that energy store, and will help yoru plant direct energy towards fruit development rather than sustaining leaves. Fertilization can also be helpful following this pruning, as many of the leaves you remove will hold stored growth energy. Following the second main pruning of the season, you should allow the fruits on your Peppers to fully mature. This type of pruning gives your Peppers the chance to focus all of its energy towards fruit development.Īfter you perform the frist main pruning of the season, in which you should remove most or all of the nonessential stems, you should water and fertilize your plant to help it recover from your pruning cuts and put forth new growth more quickly. At this time, you should cut off any flowers or excess leaves as well as any stems that do not hold fruits. The second form of pruning should occur after the bloom period when the fruit development process is just beginning. Removing stems that do not contribute to the plant's main structure, or any leaves that appear wilted, will make your Peppers better-suited to supporting heavy fruits later in the season.

During the early part of the season, you should use your pruning cuts to create the strongest form for your Peppers.

Make your pruning cut as close to the larger stem as you can, to remove the smaller stem entirely and prevent it from regrowing. Whether you are performing early-season, or late season pruning, you should follow each stem you intend to remove back to where it meets a larger stem or the main stem.

The best tool to use to prune your Peppers is a pair of clean and sharp hand-held pruning shears. As such, you should use caution when you prune, lest you cause unintended damage to otherwise healthy stems. Peppers tends to be relatively delicate plants compared to other fruit-bearing species.

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