Sweet pepper.

A long crop where colour is the product

Sweet pepper is a long-cycle crop planted once and carried through most of the year, and its economics turn on ripe colour. A pepper picked green and a pepper carried to red are the same plant doing different amounts of work, and the extra weeks on the plant are paid for in light, heat and fruit that could have been harvested earlier. The choice of harvest stage is therefore a commercial decision made before the house is designed, not a picking preference settled later.

The plant is grown on substrate and carried on a high wire, with a slower set and a heavier fruit than cucumber. It is sensitive to the balance between vegetative and generative growth, and it responds to that balance over weeks rather than days. A climate system that holds a steady relationship between temperature and light will hold a steady set; one that swings will produce a crop that flushes and then stalls.

Ripe colour is a genetic property of the cultivar, not a harvest choice, and this is the distinction that most often goes wrong in planning. Red, yellow and orange are separate genotype classes with separate cultivars. Green is a harvest stage, and a green-harvested crop still has a genetic ripe colour that has to be recorded separately. Pointed peppers are a different product again, with their own fruit mass and plant architecture, and they are spaced and supported accordingly.

DutchGreenhouses® specifies the structure, climate, screening and irrigation around the pepper type, its harvest stage and the local climate, so the house supports the colour being sold rather than pepper in the abstract. Get in touch to plan a pepper greenhouse.