I admire your desire to constantly improve, but it looks like your plants are doing really well. I'm interested to see how your experiment turns out. Please keep us posted.

Tim

To me,I think that people say don't trim leaves but I think they are mostly talking about smaller plants BEFORE they start branching out.

They trim too early trying to cause branching out before the plant is ready-roots etc.
They also think of trimming the suckers or buds off a Tomato plant rather than a pepper is the same thing.

Peppers do better if the larger leaves are trimmed to give new growth more light.
I use both vertical and horizontal light on my starter plants to encourage early branching but wait until they are in their final container and well rooted before I strip all the outside stuff off.
In hydro with good lighting I can strip the plants down earlier.
I use LEDS which are different than some other light sources.
They don't need hardening off as far as light goes but I have to let a plant grow roots before I put it in my garden.
I grow everything in pots so if a start doesn't have big enough roots to support the plant in 100 degree weather,if it doesn't get watered 2X a day it gets cooked.

An example of nature trimming plants down is when cabbage loopers eat the leaves down to nothing on a plant.
IF the plant is healthy it always comes back bushier iF you get rid of the leaf eating critters.
A dose of fish emultion doesn't hurt either(5-1-1).

From your pics you are doing your trimming at the right time.
As far as pinching pepper plant buds goes,peppers tend to abort buds if the plant can't support them.Unlike some other stuiff that will grow a ton of crap fruit if too many buds are left to fruit when the plant isn't ready to support the fruit.

Good job,you seem to be doing good ,your plants look very happy.
As far as Pubescens go,I grow a LOT of them.No trimming needed here in our climate.
If I trimmed them during the season the pods get cooked.They need shade.
My garden is 90 percent southern exposure.
Pots get hot and roots get warm.
Shade cloth helps but soil temp. in pots can be a problem in the summer.
I get more pods from most stuff in late spring and early fall here.
I'm sure it's due to my pots getting too hot.Even in my true 20 gal. pots.

Keep doing what you are doing,why fix something that isn't broke?

@smokemaster you could just buy cheap survival blankets off ebay, and wrap the containers in them from the outside. loosely attaching the blanket would work,i don't think you'd have to be too strict with it. those are mylar blankets, so they shouldn't reflect sunlight in a way that causes hotspots, and they should help keep your containers cool... just suggesting

Caelian, plants look great, and i agree with your choice of leaves and branches to remove. expect massive growth from those nodes that are now exposed to light.
i wonder, would a full defoliation work on a pepper?
i might try it just for fun :)

Tim, thank you for your opinion I'll keep updates this thread. Still I have not seen obvious problems of my plants but they have to go a long way.

Smokemaster, thank you for sharing your experiences and opinion. You are dealing with that hot climate and here cold and uncertain weather, now I feel like winter again. According to the climatic condition may be we need different type of containers and sizes. Here growing chilies in 5 gallons are tricky, and around 2/3 gallon containers are very good for the plants' health. I use LED grow lights recently, they are vertical.

Teyo, thank you for sharing. Defoliation would be worked if we do on right time and condition of a plant.

Caelian

I agree on the 5 bucket comment Caelian. I wouldn't even dream of ever using a 5 gallon bucket where I live. My 3.75 ones are even making me nervous with such a rainy, cool summer.

off topic: what's wrong with 5 gallon buckets?

on topic: I trimmed the heck outta my plants before they started producing pods (I don't cut leaves anymore unless it's to deal with bugs). now everywhere a leaf was removed a new branch appeared. those things are really bushy now. I thought that was a good thing...

I'm gonna have to trim the heck outta my stunted tabasco. his lower branches have grown out over the edges of the pot, the lowest level of which are now below the soil line, so they must to be trimmed to repot or they'll get buried. the thing is, the lower branches have a ton of pods. oh well, tabasco pods still taste really good when they're not ripe, so I'll just eat them. problem solved.

There is no OFF TOPIC always ON TOPIC for me. I do not encourage to buy expensive nice looking containers. I like homemade, empty can and plastic containers etc. I have tried a couple of times to get some empty containers unfortunately they are more expensive than a good container. Now I started to use Plastic Trashcan from Ikea, they were imported from Poland it would be about 3 gallon size. They are half the price of a real container, I made some holes and use it. Some day I would be able to find some reasonable price empty containers. To see some of our members' empty containers made me jealous :-), nice color, good looking and probably very durable. Here 5 gallon is consider a little bit big for the common container gardeners, they are thinking about space and our climate, big size take long times to dry the soil in our climate. Very popular size would be around 2 gallon that easily fit to a windowsill. When I talked about 5 gallon,I was minority.

Knife the plants if necessary. Only plucking by hand may increase unwanted buds too. clean cut by a small sharp knife make it easier for me to control the buds.

{{gwi:1182905}}

Caelian

This post was edited by chilliwin on Fri, Jun 28, 13 at 16:27

My experiment is productive :-)

Caelian

Fooey on your conclusions. We need DATA! I.e. pictures.

;D