There's not necessarily a right or wrong way to do it. Much depends on your goals. The conventional wisdom is that picking off the earlier blossoms directs the plant's energy to making more vegetative growth, which likely is true, and which then (in theory) will give you larger, though later, harvests. But, then there's the knowledge we have in this part of the country that with sweet peppers, in particular, the temperatures that impede sweet pepper fruit set can arrive shockingly early some years. (In 2011, they arrived the first week of May in my county.) Thus, you have to be careful about pinching off blooms because the hot temperatures might arrive shortly thereafter, and then you could find yourself waiting for weeks or months for cooler weather to return so your sweet peppers will stop dropping blossoms because of the heat. In 2011, those temperatures didn't drop back into the right range for sweet bell peppers to set fruit until around mid-August when a cool, rainy spell that lasted a day or two provided the first break in the long, hot summer that allowed for sweet peppers to set fruit.

I don't think it matters whether I pinch off blooms or not. I get huge yields either way, but for the sake of my canning schedule (I need both sweet and hot peppers ready to harvest and use when my main tomato crop is maturing in mid- to late-June so I can get my salsa-making and canning done), I don't pinch off blooms. You just have to experiment and see what works for you.

One thing I have found about the generally accepted gardening rules and conventional wisdom is that those rules are made to be broken, and the conventional wisdom that works in one climate may not work in another. I don't pinch and I get huge harvests so I have no reason to arbitrarily decide to start pinching off the first blooms. Now, if I was getting unsatisfactory yields, maybe I'd decide to start pinching to see if it worked better. Don't be afraid to experiment with first one thing and then another to find what works best for you as it is the only way you'll ever find your own best way to garden. There is no one best way that is the only way to garden, no way that things must be done or have to be or should be. There are many ways to garden and many ways to grow and each of us has to carve out our own little garden path to follow. I've done that for several decades, arriving over time and with much experimentation at the processes that work best for me and my goals. The journey is so much more important than the destination, so don't be afraid to experiment and enjoy the journey. You also cannot let yourself get set in a rigid little set of "musts" and "shoulds" and insist upon growing things the same way every year because, particularly here in Oklahoma, the weather is rarely the same two years in a row and what works best in a year with a dry spring and the extra-early onset of heat may not work best in a year with a wet spring and cool weather that persists late into spring or even early into summer. Being willing to be flexible and change the way you do things pays off when Mother Nature throws you a curve ball. If there's anything at all that we understand about living and gardening in Oklahoma it is that Ma Nature throws curve balls, fast balls, breaking balls and sliders, and we have to be ready to deal with them all. Figuring out what is going to work best in a given year is just part of the process.

I do want to add that if the weather is cool and wet and if that weather is making plant growth be a bit sluggish, I might be inclined to pinch off blossoms on young pepper plants. Having said that, I have exactly that sort of weather this year and I haven't pinched off a single pepper blossom because I don't think I need to. (Sometimes reality doesn't match up with what you expect would happen in a "bad" weather year.) Even though the pepper plants are growing a bit more slowly than usual, they are making good vegetative growth even though they also are blooming and setting fruit, so there hasn't been any reason for me to think I need to sacrifice early peppers now for the idea that I could have larger yields later.

I also think it is my nature to sort of live and let live, or grow and let grow, without intervening too much in any plant's natural inclination. I think the plants do just fine if I leave them alone and let them grow they way God made them, so unless there is some reason that I must intervene, I just plant them and leave them alone and then enjoy the harvest. I could spend a lot more time in my garden pruning things and pinching things and tying things up here or directing their growth there, but that's just busy work that isn't necessary and that I do not really enjoy doing.

I pinched all of mine but they were only 3" tall. I hope they start growing this week. its supposed be warm this week finally. Last night I still had the heat going.

Okay, Dawn. It's cold here, too, Amy.

I really felt sorry for the little guys under cloudy days. It just seemed that blooming now would be stressful. But what do I know? Perhaps I don't trust my bed-building abilities or, like you write, the nature of things. I'll keep an eye on them and if they look sickly, I'll dispose of the bloom/growth to take off the stress.

Kim, I bet the heat will kick those plants into gear.

While we haven't really been warm here, the pepper plants' growth has improved a lot the last 2 or 3 weeks. We have been getting little flashes of sunlight---20 minutes here, 2 hours there, and the plants respond to even those small amounts of sunshine. I imagine a whole day of sunshine would make them start growing like mad, but I don't know when we're going to have a whole day of sunshine. Right now that seems like an impossible dream, so I'm just hoping that maybe we'll have a half day of sunshine one day soon.

There's heavy rain in the forecast today (a 90% chance) which I hope just doesn't happen so we're going to stay cool today, but beginning tomorrow we are supposed to have highs in the 80s which certainly will feel more seasonal. This has been the coolest, cloudiest May we've had in ages.

Bon, Blooming could be stressful, but it is what plants are designed to do and I just prefer not to fight their natural inclination.

I could use tomato plants as an example. I did a sort of tomato plant inventory the other day, looking carefully at each plant to see which ones had set fruit, and how much, and how far along the fruit were, size-wise. This year, in an effort to spread the harvest out a little better, I transplanted tomato plants into the ground over a six-week period, putting roughly the same number of plants in the ground each week. I did this because of the rainfall, figuring if heavy rain was being hard on the plants early in their lives (and it was), then spreading out planting over a longer time frame meant the younger plants hopefully would not be as exposed to weeks and weeks of heavy rainfall as the earliest beds of tomatoes had been. Once the plants were in the ground, I left them alone, other than removing low foliage on the plants to allow better air flow and to hopefully help keep the plants healthier in the current environment of constant rainfall, high humidity, fog, mist, and gray, cloudy skies.

In a year with more sunlight and heat, it is likely that the last plants that went into the ground already would have caught up to the first ones that went into the ground, but since it has been cool and cloudy and excessively wet, they haven't caught up yet (though I think they all will look pretty much the same size by mid-June). If I took even a non-gardener into the garden and asked them to figure out which row of tomato plants went in each week, I think it would be easier to tell just by the size of the plants---they are like stair steps. Eventually, though, the last row planted will catch up in size to the first row planted. It happens every year.

The plants that went into the ground the first week, which included the 4 purchased plants grown on in larger containers for several weeks before being planted into the ground, are the ones that have the most fruit. The 4 purchased plants have 4 to 10 times as much fruit as the rest of the plants, and that's because I let every flower that the small plants produced stay and turn into tomatoes. That means the flowers that bloomed in latest February or earliest March produced the tomatoes we ate last . Three of those 4 plants produce slicing type tomatoes (Big Beef, Early Girl and Celebrity) and the other one is a cherry type (Sweet 100). If you stand and look at the row of plants, only Celebrity seems smaller than the home-grown plants that went into the ground at the same time, and that is because it is a Semi-Determinate type. All the others are just as tall and wide as the home-grown plants. The purchased plants that bloomed a month before the home-grown plants have roughly 30-40 fruit each (with more on the Sweet 100) and yet that large fruit load hasn't kept the plants from growing at roughly the same pace as the home-grown plants that started blooming later and have far fewer fruit. So, I think in this particular case that leaving the blossoms on the young plants didn't harm them at all. Their growth has kept pace with plants that bloomed and set fruit significantly later, and they are providing the ripe tomatoes we're eating now. This is why I don't pinch off blooms. I want to be eating tomatoes (and the same is true with peppers) from the garden for the longest possible time frame, and removing early blossoms means we wait longer for the first fruit to be harvested and eaten. And, the above example, in a nutshell, is why I don't pinch. I never have either, not with peppers or tomatoes or anything else. Maybe it is because my dad never pinched off blossoms and also because I grew up gardening in zone 8 Texas where your best hope of getting a harvest was from those early blooms because far too often the heat will shut down tomato and sweet pepper production far too early in the year. In a climate that hot, pinching off blossoms makes no sense, and here in my zone 7 garden, it doesn't either most years. If I ever have a year where the weather and plant growth make me feel like I should be pinching off blooms, I'll let you know, but it hasn't happened yet.

Dawn

Dear Kim. You are not Amy. Apologies. Signed, Goofy.

you silly

LOL, I was confused.

I have tomatoes blooming. These are the tomato plants I tossed into a pile. LOL The rain watered the roots right in. Ima leave everything alone. I have enough to worry about. I'm just glad they're in elevated hugels.

I looked again. The most prolific bloomer is that Medusa I got from Dawn. Yip! Should be pretty.