I live in zone 5a, which has nice black soil on top and clay about 4-5 inches below that. This is my first vegetable bed here. I dug it up in the fall, added manure and covered with straw for the winter. Then in the spring before planting, I lifted the mulch, added more manure, Espoma biotone (3-4-4) and blood meal, mixed it up again and put in my starts: a yellow bell pepper and jalapeno about 18 inches apart.

We have had a very rainy June--it's rained nearly every day. But prior to that, I made sure soil around the plants did not dry out.

Individual plant details below:

Yellow Bell - planted early May. Started three fruits pretty quickly. (You can see in the photo attached.) The plant has continued to flower, however, these flowers do not seem to be leading to fruits. Should I be concerned or is the plant conserving energy for the three fruits it's already developing? From the photo, you can see that a few of the lower leaves have yellow spots. Not sure if this is related or bad.

Jalapeno - planted late May (photo in next post). Start seemed pretty mature when planted; it was already starting to form buds. But so far, nothing has really happened. The buds never turned to fruit. The leaves here are yellowing in a way that looks like some sort of fungal problem. They were actually worse a couple of weeks ago, but have greened up for some reason. Flower production has nearly halted. It's a long story, but I have another jalapeno start (different source) that I still haven't put in the ground, and it's already fruiting. So it seems there is something wrong with this one.

Any advice? As I said, it's been very wet here for the past four weeks. My tomatoes seem to be fruiting nicely so far. But my eggplants keep dropping blossoms, so it made me wonder if the peppers could be experiencing similar stress.

Thanks!
Jenny

And here is a photo of the jalapeno plant. (Sorry, I don't know why it's formatting them horizontally.)

Thanks, Slimy. I've moved aside the mulch to let the plants dry out a bit.

As for fertilizing, I actually used a compost-manure (not straight manure) with some espoma biotone which is 3-4-4. I have not fertilized since. What would you recommend using, Ohiofem?

Thanks, all!

An organic option that works a little faster -- which can be expensive -- would be a mixture of fish emulsion and liquid seaweed. There are also balanced organic fertilizers made by espoma that are a little more potent than Biotone, like Tomatotone or Gardentone. Other brands are also available. If you don't object to chemical fertilizer, something with a balance of all three nutrients plus calcium, magnesium and micronutrients would be good.

Use 1/8 Cup (1 fl. Oz. or 2 Tablespoons) per gallon of water. Feed vegetables, flowers, trees and shrubs every 2-3 weeks. Apply until soil is saturated or as a foliar feed until leaves are wet, top & bottom. It is best to foliar feed early or late in the day.

So unless your mix is a lot stronger than Neptune's Harvest, I would double the dose. When I water with the mixture I do it until the soil is saturated around the plant. Depending on how wet the soil already is, that could mean a gallon or more per plant.