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Perfect peppers

St. David’s Hydroponics grows them for shipment across North America

They harvest about 75 kilos of giant, perfect peppers each week. St. David’s Hydroponics is a whopping 17 1/2 acres of agricultural activity under glass — and it’s hot. As I walked through the thousands of eight-foot tall pepper plants, workers were harvesting red peppers. Huge trailers full and overflowing with glistening, beautiful peppers were being wheeled into the packaging area to be sorted by size and packaged by weight. Boxes were piled high, waiting for shipment to grocery stores that would offer these tasty peppers within 24 hours of being picked. Now that’s fresh!

I grow peppers in my own backyard and what I found at St. David’s Hydroponics was an amazingly huge operation that was more science than I’d known to be possible.

Harvest ends in November. Plants are removed and new seedlings are planted. Within four to five weeks the pepper plants are two feet tall and after eight weeks or so, the first peppers come off the plants. From November to February, no peppers are harvested.

The plants are pruned back so the peppers grow large and hardy. As I watched huge trailers of peppers move by me I noticed how clean and beautiful they look. They use no sprays, they’re fed organic material and everything about growing and running the greenhouse is perfectly natural. It’s an efficient operation, producing healthy, delicious and safe food.

Pickers were busy cutting ripe peppers from the tall plants, packers were busy sorting and boxing them while a transport truck backs into the loading dock. Even though peppers have a shelf life of two weeks, these peppers will be on the shelves of high-end grocers across North America the next day or two (depending on the distance). This is contrary to the shriveled, soft peppers we often see in some local stores that come from the other side of the world. By the time we buy them, they’ve begun to expire.

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