We planted 3 pepper plants (poblano, jalapeño, and Anaheim) in a raised garden bed. Tomatoes in the same bed are doing just fine. We feel like they are getting enough watering but any help would be appreciated!
this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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Do you fertilize or sidedress with compost? Tomatoes and peppers tend to be heavy feeders. They need a lot of nutrients (but follow package directions if using fertilizer). And I can’t tell from the picture if the soil is mulched. Mulching goes a long way to help prevent soil moisture from evaporating, cooling the roots, and generally helping to limit the impact of extremes in heat and water availability on plants.
We may not have fertilized soon enough. We will see if we can give the peppers a fair shot. Thank you for your help!
Best of luck to you. For what it’s worth, I have a single pepper plant that looks beautiful, puts out a great succession of flowers, and is surrounded by pollinator plants. But it just hasn’t put out a single fruit yet. Oh well. It won’t deter me from planting again next year.
How hot is it where you're at? I have some overwintered peppers that are still full of fruit that set earlier in the season, but pretty much every flower has fallen off for a while now. High heat doesn't reduce flowering much, but it does dramatically stop fruit production.
If you're in the US, I'm in a hardiness zone of 8b/9a though. We have a very long growing season so I know I'll get a fall harvest as well out of both new and old plants.
Zone 7b. It’s low- to upper-80s lately, but it does get a bit of afternoon shade. I see a new cluster of flowers taking shape, so I’ll keep an eye on them and maybe do some pollinating of my own.
Hmm that doesn't seem like it'd be hot enough to cause consistent drop assuming nighttime lows are at least getting to 70.
I do some self pollination on the plants I baby the most, but a big help for me was when I started actually changing what I fed throughout the growing season. A lower N, higher P fertilizer when I wanted to switch from growing to fruiting helped me get a lot more fruit.
Just curious: by pollinator plants you mean pollinator attractors around your single pepper plant, correct? You may wish to use blooms that go to seed right before your peppers bloom. There's lots of advice out there about planting flowers to get pollinators in the habit of being in the space where your food plants are growing, but not as many sources that talk about the scheduling of it all. For the best mileage out of that kind of setup you generally want pollinator attractors > food plants > predatory wasp attractors (pollinator plants with big flower pads, like umbellifers).
The idea of scheduled blooms to complement edible foods is an interesting one for sure. I guess I assumed that there is more wildlife wanting the flowery bits than I have flowery bits to offer, so that none would necessarily eclipse the other, if that’s what you were meaning. My pepper plant is in a pot in the thick of lavender, rudbeckia, alyssum, basil that has gone to flower, and a couple other things. Everything seems pretty well occupied at the moment since it’s all in full bloom, with different types of insects specializing in feasting on different plants.
I don’t necessarily want to think too hard about it. My tomatoes are in the backyard, and they’re doing fine. I added the pepper plant to a container with petunias, coleus, and lantana just to offer some height and to help shade the coleus (the sprawling petunias are doing just as well of a job at that). But it’s fun to think about how to time things just right, if not also somewhat difficult. Similar to cooking.
In any case, my perennials are there and getting fully established so the best I could do would be to maybe change location of my peppers next year. But the season is still young. I have hope.
Hah I don't mean to pressure you, I just spend a lot of time thinking about producing food from gardens. You're totally right, though, it's still early in the season, and if your garden is providing you joy, then it's doing its job!
I'm ... not great at the timing of it all, but we do stage early ephemerals around our earliest flowering fruit trees and shrubs. Once the season gets going it's difficult to get just one thing to be in flower so we often leave high summer as its own free for all.