Need some Bell Pepper help!

[jen1422]

[align=left]I planted 2 bell pepper plants this spring that I had bought at Home Depot. They never grew very tall and both only produced one pepper, and both of those peppers were ruined by some sort of pest. There was a big hole chewed right into the fruit itself.[/align]
[align=left]2 questions:
How can I get the plants to grow tall and strong to produce more peppers?
And how can I prevent things from chewing up the peppers I do end up with? I am currently not using any kind of insecticide, since I am going for all organic gardening.[/align]
[align=left]I planted a jalapeno plant at the same time and it has produced many jalapenos which we have enjoyed in Mexican dishes. Obviously the pests know to leave the hot stuff alone. ;)[/align]

[Newt]

Hi Jen,

Actually birds are known to eat hot peppers.* Usually tbey are looking for moisture when they eat any kind of peppers.

Not sure what is going on with your sweet peppers. You don't mention any symptoms of the leaves or stems, so I would rule out a virus.* I do know that too much nitrogen fertilizer will produce lots of leafy growth at the expense of flowers, but that doesn't seem to be your problem. I'm thinking the plants might have become stunted due to poor watering (over or under watering) before you purchased them.* Overwatering can cause slow and stunted growth.

The best way to get them to produce more peppers is to get them to produce more flowers.* This can be done by removing the first set of flowers that appear.* A floating row cover aka remay will keep pests away from your plants.* Bird netting also helps.

Newt

[jen1422]

The stems and leaves are all fine. Its just the peppers themselves that end up with a big hole in them. I do think they were stunted from underwatering. We had a sprinkler system installed a month ago and all of my plants seem to be flourishing now. So maybe that was the issue with the small plants and only bearing one pepper each.

I will look into that remay thing. I've got a wire fence around the garden to keep the rabbits out and it has worked pretty well so far, but obviously it doesn't deter the birds.

Thank you for your advice! :)

[Newt]

Jen, you are very welcome!

Newt

[Guilt Trip]

[user=5]Newt[/user] wrote:

Jen, you are very welcome!

Newt

I also had a Tomato plant from the HD store that was slow, and I really mean Slow, I had it in a half/barrel tub with good soil mix, but my*mix* many browns (bark/wood chips and shavings) found that out on a Fourm, a true Nitrogen Lock up mix, so I took chopped up two five gallon buckets of dried cow manure, threw in in my big concrete mixer and let it mix and beat for 1/2 hour or more, also threw some manganese and liquid Iron in the mix and coverer the tomato with about 10" of that stuff, Bingo I don't know what it was but I surely woke that baby up, I picked off about 10 tomatoes before it got to hot this sumer in central Florida, so pull them out start over or maybe Shock them with Manure, Just my thoughts Guilt Trip