Deeply Rooted Peppers

[digitS']

I was potting up several dozen peppers today -- "The Big Early" bells all the way down to the tiny Thai Hots.

Mostly, I've been busy with tomatoes and had a few eggplant to get out of their community containers yesterday. I get a close look at the Solanaceae family every year . One thing I'm impressed with is the length of the pepper seedlings' roots.

I push the handle of my plastic spoon (planting tool ) into the 4-pack soil and, essentially always, have to get in there with my index digitS' and make the hole deeper. I'll do that with lots of the tomatoes also but the pepper plants are smaller and I'm still trying to get to maximum depth with the Thai Hots!

It is easy to see how they are grown in some of the hottest parts of the country. Peppers must do a pretty good job finding moisture. California Extension notes that their roots may reach 48" in depth. Vegetable Root Depth

Steve

 

[baymule]

48 inches deep?? I sure didn't know that. No wonder peppers are so yummy, they dig deep to bring up all the goodness of the earth.

 

[897tgigvib]

That's a bonus project for someone growing Peppers! At the end of the season carefully dig them up, clean the roots off, and photo them with a tape measure to see how long the roots grew.

 

[897tgigvib]

Another thing about a crop with roots that long is SOIL SUSTAINABILITY! With those deep roots bringing nutrients from so deep up to the plant, they are tapping sources of nutrients otherwise unavailable which can then be composted at the end of the season, giving those formerly locked down nutrients to be available for next year's plants!

 

[digitS']

I really think that the best things we can add to our soil are roots!

If I wanted to "rob" nutrients from another location, I suppose that I'd want to get the roots along with the alfalfa or whatever. Imagine !

Not doing that -- it is important to "grow something" in our gardens! Grow, grow, grow -- every season, all season. If you only plant in the spring, make sure that they are full-season crops. If you harvest and cannot replant because of fall frosts, fine. Otherwise, grow something! Even if you have no intention of using it in the kitchen. Your soil organisms will think highly of you .

Steve
. . . climbing off soapbox . . .

 

[bobm]

Another thing about a crop with roots that long is SOIL SUSTAINABILITY! With those deep roots bringing nutrients from so deep up to the plant, they are tapping sources of nutrients otherwise unavailable which can then be composted at the end of the season, giving those formerly locked down nutrients to be available for next year's plants!

That may be so in areas where the soil is deep. On my 20 acre ranch in C. Cal. ( used to be a part of an open range cattle ranch since 1860's) there is a hardpan about 6" thick that varies in depth from on the surface to 4' down, meandering up and down about every 10 feet. I had to use a D9 with a deep ripper plow to break up the hardpan to 2' depth to get a half way decent pastures.

 

[so lucky]

I read somewhere--I think it was on a link posted on this forum, about the benefits of double digging. It said that corn roots go down about 5 feet. Of course, we only see about 8" of roots if we pull up a stalk. This article was showing how good DEEP soil sustains corn even in a drought. Actually the drought-ed plants starve to death because there is no moisture down deep to allow them to bring the nutrients up in the feeder roots. The experience I have in my garden sure supports this information.

 

[ducks4you]

So glad I'm rotating my peppers to a bed that I double dug--30 inches below ground level--in 2011. Last year's bed wasn't that deep and they didn't do that well in 2012, though nothing else did, either.