Thursday, June 17, 2010

Progress with Peppers

I planted a pair each of California Wonder, Chocolate Bell, Hungarian Hot Wax and Klari Baby Cheese. The wonders and the chocolate bells are flowering and trying to fruit but the plants look kind of ragged after being wind blasted over the last couple of days. But the hot wax and klari peppers are doing great with lots of peppers coming out.



I sprayed my eggplants with a a diluted Neem oil solution in an attempt to combat the aphids. The recommended dose was 0.5% Neem to water and a bit of detergent. Too early to tell if it's working. There are a few dead aphids on the leaves though. Don't really know if they're dead but they don't seem to be crawling around or doing anything. Might just be the result of the detergent in the spray. I've read that Neem is also good against powdery mildew which I've spotted on one of my pumpkin vines so I gave it a blast of Neem here and there also.



Speaking of pumpkins, I constructed a proper trellis for my plant. Just need to get it set up. With the trellis I will be able to maintain the vines vertically which should allow the leaves to collect more sunlight given that all of my sunlight pours in from the west and not overhead.

4 comments:

Alex N said...

Probably a stupid question- but is there more than one pepper plant in that pot in the picture?

My pepper plant has started flowering and fruiting, but I remember what you had said in an article about clipping the early flowers/fruits to encourage more production. I can't tell if it's too early and I should clip the two little peppers. I bought the seedling and transplanted about a month ago. What do you think?

Jeff said...

It's two plants and they're about a foot tall. These cheese peppers are doing really well this year, even with a few aphids sucking on them. Wish I could say that about my chocolate bell peppers :(

If you planted out peppers a month ago and they're flowering and starting to set fruit, at this point I'd say just let them. But I guess it also depends on how big you want the plants to grow. How big is your pepper plant now? What type of Pepper?

I was pinching flowers off my peppers every day when they were still indoors but once I got them planted outside I let them be. They were already quite large and nearing two months old.

The main reason you want to prevent early fruit set is to force the plant to grow bigger since a bigger plant should be able to produce more fruit. I've also found that some of those early peppers never reach a good size. But even so, there's no harm in letting them grow a little to see what happens.

Alex N said...

It's a green pepper plants, a Better Belle burpee transplant. About a foot tall, I would say, and a decent amount of leaves at the top.
These were from the first two flowers that I saw, there weren't any others since I got it.

Jeff said...

The plant could still be trying to recover form being transplanted. Or, since it's got two peppers already on the go, doesn't "feel the need" to put out more buds. But it's early yet. My California Wonder plants which produce bell peppers also, each have a pair of peppers and like your plant, haven't flowered since those first peppers appeared. But I'm confident that as the season progresses, I'll get more peppers. And so should you.