When do you pick your sweet peppers?

I've only grown sweet peppers for a few years (from a packet of "mixed sweet peppers", some of which have been quite "interesting"!)

This year fate has decided that all four plants are "standard" bell peppers which, although they have a very handy built-in traffic light colour system to tell you when they are ripe, they don't let you know whether picking them whilst still green will encourage more fruit to set.

My plants have got about 4 peppers apiece on, the largest of which are probably big enough to eat as green peppers now; they are showing signs of aborting the most recently set flowers as if they think they've done enough!

Problem for me is that I really prefer to eat them as red peppers; what do you do, and how many peppers (of any colour) do you expect to get?

you will get more peppers if you pick them green

About 4-6 is what I get if I keep them on to ripen, so you seem to be about the same.
I'm growing what's sposed to be a sooper dooper heavy yielding one.........but so far it's no better than last years  

(Last year I said no more aubergines and no more peppers, cos it wasn't worth it.....but I've tried them both again )

Mum: I suspected that you-know-whose law would apply to the number of peppers you get versus how ripe you prefer to eat them!

I've postponed trying aubergines given that it's my first year with a greenhouse, but I might try them next year (some crops don't really justify the effort do they, but I still enjoy seeing what I can get away with!)

Shokky: as you will have gathered I don't have a lot of experience of growing sweet peppers - I did hedge my bets by growing one lot in the house and the others in the greenhouse and the "house-plants" are doing a bit better than the others, which is probably not that surprising given the difficult conditions so far this year.