Pepper Harvesting

Harvesting pepper is done when some of seeds are becoming ripened. It indicates seeds are yellow color. Then, farmers know that this is the time of reaping the yield and they start to pickup branches of pepper one by one. In some areas, pepper creepers have grown up to the top of trees such coconuts, jack trees, mangoes etc. farmers have to climb on the trees to pick up the harvesting of peppers. In such occasions, peoples use bamboo trees to climb up or use piece of branch of a tree to tie up horizontally to the stem of the tree that pepper wrapped. Finally, pepper cultivator climbs to the rod and pluck peppers easily. Otherwise, if pepper creepers have gone up with small bushes of Ginisiriya trees, they use ladder to reap the harvesting.

Preperation of Pepper sheeds 

Pickup pepper seeds are removed from the bunch and then put under the sun light to dry it out. When they are dried, seeds becomes in black color. Some can cut a seed by teeth to check state of drying. When, it is dried up enough, they are gone to next step to remove some debris by using winnowing fan. Now they are ready to sale or consume.

Rural Beliefs

Some villagers believe that keeping the pepper nerves on the road for getting crushed to feet of passengers will give more harvest on next time. So, they used to put pepper nerves of the bunch of seeds on the road.

High quality black Pepper is available in Sri Lanka for sale as form of powder or nuts. Packed powder can be found in spice sections in super markets. In retail shop, somebody can purchase it as seeds as he likes. Pepper powder is used to get flavor at the cooking vegetable curry or salads etc. And also, it is used as traditional medicine in Ayurvedic sector.

Several exporters of black peppers are available in Sri Lanka. They will provide high quality products. According to available statistics, pepper production in Sri Lanka as follows.  

Production of pepper (MT)

Year	Production
2013	28,000
2014	18,660
2015	28,177
2016	18,476
2017	29,546
2018	22,551
2019	22,156
2020	23,970
2021(a)	25,047
2022(b)	44,090

(a) Revised  (b) Provisional

Source: Annual Report 2022 – Central Bank of Sri Lanka 

Average Producer Price of Pepper (Rupees)

Year	2019	2020	2021	2022
1kg	540.89	541.12	723.27	1587.69

 Source: Annual Report 2022 – Central Bank of Sri Lanka