Haste always makes waste when it comes to growing peppers in the backyard garden. The usual scenario is that you set out pepper plants about the same time you’re planting tomatoes, but for whatever reason you don’t pick the first peppers until early August. Probably, this has happened to you before, but you never discovered what went wrong. Today, you know!

The secret: don’t plant pepper plants until it’s so scorching hot outdoors that the last thing you want to do is to get down on all fours and plant pepper plants when you’d much rather be swimming at the beach or in someone’s neighborhood pool. That’s it: plant when it’s blazing hot. Now, let’s explore why pepper plants only fruit this way.

First, there is a leaf-to-flower index for everything that blossoms and yields fruit. With tomato plants, the plant must manufacture 13 leaves before the first flower happens, is pollinated, and your first tomato is on the way. Every 13 leaves after that, you get another tomato. With broccoli, it’s 40 leaves to get the first “head.” With sweet corn, it’s six leaves before the first tassel, wind pollination, then the first corn husk.

With peppers, the leaf-to-flower number is 9. This means the plant must produce nine new leaves before the first flower happens. Trouble is, pepper plants don’t work this way when the soil is cool or cold. When you set out pepper plants before (when you planted tomatoes), the soil was downright cool. Something strange happened. Even throwing holy water on the plant wouldn’t have changed things. In cool soils, pepper plants do things differently. They make the first nine leaves, but cannot develop a flower. Instead, the plant converts the sugar (produced by the first nine leaves) into protein, then starts growing like a rocket because of excess protein available to the plant. With soil temperatures still on the cool side, the next nine leaves continue the same ritual: the sugar isn’t diverted for flower bud formation, but is converted into protein to continue the rocket-like growth of the plant.

Well, it’s not until the beaches are jam-packed that scorching temperatures finally reach the garden. By that time, everything is growing well, but it’s only then that pepper plants adjust to the new environment. Then, sugar produced by the next cluster of nine leaves is used to develop the first flower. It usually takes 3-to-4 weeks for the first fruit to be picked in the garden, after which dozens and dozens of peppers follow on the same plant. Therein lies the message for pepper lovers: don’t plant your “starter pepper plants” until it’s blazing hot and you don’t want to sweat and die of heat prostration in the veggie garden.

Other cultural hints:

* Add pulverized limestone to the hole as you plant peppers. Some lime needs to be in the hole, then a dusting of lime atop the hole. Ideally, soil pH for peppers should be between 7 and 7.5.