Deliciously Sweet: Growing Bell Peppers and Tomatoes

Hey folks! If you have read my passed gardening articles you know my advice is for the beginner food gardener. I will continue in that vein, but stay tuned in because my advice will gradually become more focused and will aid anyone from a beginner to an expert. Today I’ll give some tips for growing some deliciously sweet bell peppers and tomatoes.

Tomatoes and bell peppers have a lot of the same needs and they can co-exist quite well, which is why I am tackling them in tandem. In my last Just Grow Food article, I touched on the three main factors to consider while preparing your garden site. I will take you through each of these three factors in relation to tomatoes and peppers today, and cue you in on some do’s and don’ts.

WATER: Tomatoes and peppers like a lot of water. Unlike some vegetables and most herbs, they do better if they don’t dry out completely between waterings, so you have to really stay on top of keeping these guys wet. If they go a long time between waterings, it can cause problems, like tomatoes cracking while on the vine, and peppers plants having weak immune systems and the produce developing rot spots. Drip systems are ideal for these vegetables (drip is really ideal for everything) but it can be expensive to install, so if that is not an option, building “berms” and hand watering is a good alternative. I have a greenhouse of tomatoes and peppers, shown in its early stages in the pictures below. You can see the berms I created around my plants, essentially little walls to retain and focus the water right to the plant’s roots. For perennials, shrubs, and trees, berms are not ideal because they don’t encourage roots to spread any further than the berm walls, but for annual plants, they work great because the roots systems only have one year of growth. Make your dirt berms 3 or 4 inches high and at least 1 or 2 feet in diameter. Any less may stunt root growth, even for annuals. Frequency of watering depends on maturity of plant, soil make-up, and heat of the sun. I fill the berms in my greenhouse everyday while the plants are young, and then switch to filling the berms twice when I water, and watering every two to three days as the plants increase in size and begin to flower.

SUN: These guys like as much sun as humanly possible. If you are buying started plants from a nursery, make sure to pick ones that have had enough sun. You can tell this by looking at the thickness of stems and distance between branch “nodes” (where a limb shoots out from the main stock). A tomato or pepper plant that has sufficient sunlight will have dark green, thick, compact stems. A plant that struggles for sun will be taller and lankier, with more distance between branch nodes. The distance between nodes shows whether a plant is stretching and elongating to try to find sun, or if it is growing properly and stoutly because it doesn’t have to search for extra sun.

SOIL: This factor is the fun one. Crafting your soil for delicious food growth can be vastly complicated, but there are a few things to start with when it comes to tomatoes and peppers specifically. Although these plants don’t like to dry out completely, they still need well drained soil. “Blossom end rot” (when the tips of tomatoes turn black) can develop if a plant’s soil is too wet and won’t drain quickly, as well as other issues (blossom end rot can also be amended by adding calcium to your soil, there are various kinds of garden calcium, I have solved the problem by mixing calcium nitrate into the soil when planting). There are many ways to amend your soil to make some delicious fruits, but as far as turning decent tomatoes and peppers into irresistible comfort food, I suggest adding leaf compost and garden dry molasses to your soil. I did this just this year and noticed an INCREDIBLE change in taste. I will attempt to explain why:

Decomposing organic matter in your garden soil seems to affect the taste of your produce based on what it is made up of and what kind of microbial life is breaking it down. Soil has two basic forms of microbial life that affect plants: fungi and bacteria. Fungi primarily breaks down organic material high in carbon (bark and woody material), and bacteria breaks down materials high in nitrogen (leaves, grass clippings, green manure). I have done a lot of research in this area and to be honest, I could not find a study with a definitive answer that one of these affects the taste of produce grown from its soil, but I cannot deny that I believe there is a huge effect. There is, on the other hand, a lot of evidence that vegetables grow and produce much better with a soil that is high in bacteria rather than fungus. In years passed, I used compost in my greenhouse that had a fair amount of woody material, and thus, fungus. This year, I mixed a high amount of leafy compost and dry molasses into the soil, thus attracting bacteria, and had a vastly sweeter, tastier crop. Garden dry molasses is a sugar by-product and is mixed with roughage products, all of which feed bacteria very efficiently. SO, the leafier, lighter, greener the soil amendment, the better for tomatoes and peppers.

I know that’s a lot of info! To summarize, get your tomatoes and bell peppers in some heavy sun, water them deeply, and amend their soil with leafy green compost/manure. See what happens when Spring rolls around, and just grow some food!