24,795 Garden Web Discussions | Vegetable Gardening

Hey, they haven't died!
Peppers are fancy weeds that make tasty seed pods. Plant them in your nice garden after after they get going, treat them like your fancy weed patch. Don't do much. Ignore them. Pull off any obvious bugs. Spray some water if they look near death. Dump some fish emulsion water at some point just because you have some. Then--enjoy your peppers! Just remember, somewhere in the world, peppers are the local weeds and they're doing just fine without any fuss.

I found, that as bigger the fruit of the pepper suppose to be, the less chance you get any of it colored. They either do not set more then few bells, or get rotten on the way to ripe. So in order to get a lot (like a gallon+ per plant over the season) I switched to early and small fruited types. Orange blaze and Gypsy hybrid are my favorites for several years... This year I added one more I am happy with: Cute Staff red. Very productive so far. I am in the same zone as you, and I starting my peppers from seeds inside in the end of Feb or early March in half gallon pots. South-east window plus additional lights are the must. Do not over water. Use good soil mix. Avoid peat moss - they do not like acidity of it. I mix coco fiber(2), compost(2), vermiculite(1) and perlite(1) + long release fertilizer. Feed them lightly when they are a 3-4 weeks old and every 1-2 weeks. By April they should be almost a foot high. I set up heated greenhouse on the deck and move them there when weather permits till the end of May. Make sure that the acidity of your soil is not high where you transplant them. Check it in fall, add lime if needed. Before planting I add compost, super phosphate and potash and calcium. Good luck!

If raised berms in the wet area are possible then I think that is the way to go. You need to eliminate the "damp" as much as possible or use the area to grow bog-loving crops there. Gus might tolerate wet feet a little better than garlic would but gus crowns can rot if constantly wet. Gus might also tolerate a bit of shade but not much and it will affect production.
As for trading off best production for aesthetic appearances - that's a trade off I can't buy into so I'd find a third alternative. Got to be one.
Dave

beets like cool weather, so early spring and fall is the best time for them.
i actually just planted a dozen seeds yesterday (im just 50 miles north of you in southern CT). they are called "Early Wonder" beets and say harvest time is about 45-50 days. i grew a few of these last year indoors and they grew pretty fast. i didn't get much in terms of a large beet because they grew too large for the container, but the beet leaves i harvested from them were delicious. better than spinach and kale.. so even if you don't get a large beet (shouldn't really be a problem), if they are the usually Red Beet then the leaves are excellent, in fact, i like the beet as much as the leaves, even the red stems are good. i chop them up and sauteed in a bit of olive oil, garlic, a dash of lemon, salt and red pepper flakes.

All I was saying is that gardening is unpredictable, and we, as gardeners need to be adaptable to garden...we need to know what grows best in our zones and selectively save seed from the hardiest, strongest, most adaptable in our gardens, otherwise, we will fail more often than not.

I live in a heat island that will only get hotter. It isn't called "America's Hottest City" for nothing. So, I try to get seeds from Native Seed/SEARCH because they are working to make sure that local crop biodiversity is preserved and look for varieties that can make it in tough conditions. I've got some heirlooms from the local tribes. Based on the plant quality, they've bred their peppers to survive anything. It's blooming and trying to set pods in full sun in +110. So, my strategy is to grow things from areas of the world similar to what my climate is turning into and grow local heirlooms bred for toughness.

A big yay for my summer growing is Red Freddy basil. I planted it in a 3" deep but wide pot and left it sitting on the pavement in the sun this summer. Summer means 115 in the shade. This basil trucks along, tastes great and even survived not being watered for a few days. It is dark green instead of purple from the heat right now but doing great. So impressed it survives 3/4 the day in the sun. My thai basil can barely make it in the shade in a large pot. Big thumbs up for Red Freddy basil. It will be 114 the rest of the week in the shade and I'm not worried a bit about the basil.

I wrote an app that will look at the weather forecast for your zipcode to see if the temps at planting and harvest will work for plants. You can put in different planting dates to see what works also.
It is athttp://www.edenpatch.com/weather
If you use it, would appreciate a feedback about if the recommendations make sense...

Everyone hating on the yellow pear?? :(
I like them actually. The only ones I struggle with are the 'green envy' from Burpee. I have some that have been on the vine for 4-5 weeks and even now when I bite them they are very very crunchy, too crunchy for me.

I got what I can only guess is Verticillium wilt of my eggplant, though it is kind of impossible to say for sure, and it does not seem to have affected any other plants, except maybe some tomatoes but so many things cause wilting/yellowing lower leaves it is hard to say for sure. I thought maybe some of my potatoes had it, but the stems did not show any browning, so I am guessing it was just normal dieback or something else.

They got worse...
But then I snipped off all affected leaves, and they all mostly recovered to a decent size plant, and I still got more eggplants than I can eat out of them. It happened to every single one except one - they reached a certain size, then displayed the symptoms - yellowing and wilting leaves - often on one side of the leaf only. The plant you are looking at is a Hansel, the Galine I planted had the same issues.
I read somewhere that infection with it is favored by cool temperatures but symptoms are triggered by hot.
I think maybe I will try the BiotaMax next year, but I may try some eggplants in pots also.
Sorry to derail your thread.... no one else seems to know about it. :)

Yeah, yours looks like Verticillium. Hot/dry weather brings on faster symptom development but eggplants' normal resistance mechanisms are also bolstered by heat (provided they have sufficient moisture). So overall, hot weather seems to be beneficial, as the plants produce new leaves at a faster rate than the defoliation. That has been my observation.
There are also defoliating (severe) and non-defoliating (mild) strains of Verticillium. From what I've read, it's good to rotate crops because this favors the non-defoliating strains to build up. So even though squash is also susceptible to Verticillium, it can serve as a rotation crop between solanums. The strain that infects squash will also infect eggplant but it won't cause a severe infection.
Trichoderma is really good. I found that it suppressed Sclerotinia infections, another problem fungus I deal with. I even observed it stopping infections in progress.


Every time I read that 95 is hot, I have a good laugh. It is supposed to be 111 to 113 every day for the rest of the week here. That's the shade temp, probably next to an irrigated lawn, so imagine how it feels in the sun or sitting in a car. At those temps, you're not getting any vegetables other than dead ones. Gardening is not a summer activity for everyone, which is why if you just say where you live is "hot", random people on the Internet don't know if you mean 85 or 120.
But, yes, after you get below 95 for highs your plants will wake back up and start to produce.


I used Sevin locally and carefully a single time, on the base of the stems where the cuke beetles were congregating early in the season on young plants, long before flowering. This made a huge difference in their population, and did not harm any beneficial insects as none were there. Many chided me for it, but it was effective and as Sevin breaks down very rapidly, I think it did not do any more harm than any of these "organic" options (what is organic about chemicals in a bottle, I don't know.)

Carriehelene, yes it could very well be I hadn't thought of that. That plant is at the very end of a row, towards one side of the yard. All the neighborhood cats congregate in our yard, why I will never know. But I don't know what I could do about it?
Antmary: thank you for noticing that. Actually for many reasons that pepper plant did not get planted till end of June. It was tiny then. But it started growing so well and had set many small pods. But it is all vanishing now.
Maybe the plant will live but I don't think I will get any peppers out of it.
Thank you so much,
K.

Looks like Verticillium wilt to me. Not much you can do about it. In my experience, this disease does not necessarily result in wilting. Sometimes, yellowing and leaf shedding are the only symptoms. For unexplained reasons, only some individuals are affected. I've also had some plants recover from Verticillium infection but usually they slowly die.



Looks like a cubanelle.
In total, I grow 40 peppers, with about 14 Banana, several sweet bell, 8 jalapeno and the rest Cayenne.
I did grow Cubanelle last year, but the harvest was light and I chose not to plant them this season. So this is a possibility since I included Cubanelle in the Banana seeds.
I'll watch that to see if this is indeed Cubanelle. Great eye....