Growing Pepper Plants & the 4 Signs You Should Never Ignore!

hi guys well I just returned from two weeks visiting my family in the US and I've got a lot to share with you the garden is crazy wild right now and as you can see behind me the grow bags are well they've taken off quite a lot too but I will save all of that for a video next week because today I'm just going to take a quick moment to share with you how to troubleshoot your pepper plants now this is a make or break time for growing pepper plants and there are quite a few little problems that can arise this time of year that can be easily fixed before the plants start to set their fruit now I'm going to touch on what to do if your pepper plants are stunted I'm going to also talk about what to do if the leaves are curling or yellowing and I'll also touch on some of the common pests for your pepper plants so let's get started now this is our time here for transplanting our pepper plants outside so as you can see kind of here around me I have quite a few different pepper plants and seedlings but I'm going to start with these two that I overwintered last year now the these guys were doing great before I left but as you can see here they're looking a little worse for wear now after my two weeks away so we're going to put on our detective hat and start troubleshooting these guys so the first thing that I notice when I'm looking at this pepper plant is that there is a lot of leaf curl now Leaf curl is a sign of stress or distress when I see Leaf curl in my plants but especially my pepper plants I always start by looking for insects and here what I do is I actually look at the underside of the leaves and so you just literally have to go through the leaves and see if there are any insects now sometimes you'll actually see holes or little nibble marks in it but not always Leaf curl is very commonly associated with aphids so I do want to look at the young fresh leaves to make sure that they're all clear but the second thing that you want to look for is you want to look at the soil so those are the two kind of things look at the underside of the leaves and look at anything kind of crawling around in the soil that shouldn't be there these two my overwintered peppers are clean but this guy actually does have something showing up in the underside of the leaves but before I go into that let's go ahead and finish with these overwintered Peppers second thing I noticed is that these leaves are yellow so they're not only a little bit curled but they are yellow as well and I know that this plant was very green and healthy when I left so heavy when I left these plants were a nice rich green but the yellowing on the leaves points to a condition called chlorosis which is when a plant is unable to take up the nutrients in the soil and this is often a result of over watering now during my absence I chose to use my new rainpoint smart water timer for my garden out there which meant that that Garden is in great shape but this Garden I had to use my old manual timer which I set it on at every three day cycle but I do know from my phone app for my smart water timer that the watering schedule was actually delayed in the garden three times due to rain so that means that these guys were all getting watered probably more than they actually needed to be and what you didn't see here is when I just picked up this pot you see that for Peppers over watering can be a real problem and here's how you treat over watering and before you skip ahead it's not simply Watering your plant less number one if my plant leaves were damaged I would actually prune them peppers are really resilient in the fact that they're a lot like tomatoes and they can grow out new leaves and you shoot quite easily so trimming off a few leaves is not a problem in my case here the leaves look great so the first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to move it to a place that is not going to get any water I want them to dry out before I water them again now the second thing I'm going to do is reduce the direct sunlight exposure over the next few days to give them a little bit of time to recover after a few days let's say probably five to seven days I'm going to start reintroducing them to direct sunlight and at that point I also give them a slow release balance NPK fertilizer and that should be all that's required to get these two guys back on track but now let's go back to that plant that also had the curled leaves that I spotted something that shouldn't be there okay so this one when I was flipping over the leaves I spotted aphids on this and eggs oop there's one right there the aphids were only on two of the leaves and since this is a tiny plant then I just chose the squish it method and literally you just take your finger and kind of brush it over the leaves and squish the aphids I know it sounds gross but it's really effective if this had been a larger plant or it had been a larger infestation in that case I would have used an organic insecticide now here in France my favorite thing to use is a black soap or Seville Noir as they call it here mixture now if you're living someplace where black soap is not an option then I would recommend that you use a few drops of dish soap in warm water and spray that on your plant now here you can't see this very easily on the plant so I'm going to show you right here on a piece of paper I don't know if you can see that little red dot that's moving now that can be easily mistaken for another common pest for pepper plants and also a very detrimental one so I will come back to that in just a moment but first I did promise at the beginning of the video to talk to you about your stunted pepper plants or your stunted seeds links and tell you what to do about that what do you notice different about these two plants as you can see by this very simple comparison this one is much bigger than this one what I did right before I left is I did pot up my pepper plant this one got potted up but I was just really running out of time and so I potted it into a little pot that had taken something else out of I think where this one actually got a good sized pot to go into as you can see they really adjust to the size of the pot that you're putting them in now I don't recommend that you just throw them into a bucket because a lot of times they just don't know what to do with all that extra space and The Roots can't get enough water and so on and so forth so I do recommend that you gradually kind of increase the pot size for them that said this guy is stunted he's not going to get any bigger than this unless I move him up to a bigger pot or go ahead and plant him out in the garden and you'll be amazed once you move even a small pepper plant like this to a bigger home you should see explosive growth within a couple of weeks okay now back to those red dots I'm actually going to show you on this avocado plant because it's easier to see than on the pepper plant but it's the same thing if you see these little moving red dots you might be tempted to think that these are red spider mites red spider mites can really be detrimental to a plant but how to test and tell the difference between them I'm actually just going to pull one off of my hand here the test is if you touch it if you kind of squish it yes again I know that's really gross but if you squish it and it leaves a red stain then it's not a spider mite it's actually a clover Mite unlike spider mites clover mites are they're just kind of more of a nuisance and because I know that pests are a huge problem this time of year I made this video just for you

Channel: Now Gardening

Views: 10,743

Keywords: now gardening, pepper plants, growing peppers, growing pepper plants, pepper plants from seed, pepper plant care, pepper plant problems, leaf curl on pepper plants, watering pepper plants, watering peppers, stunted pepper plants, stunted pepper seedlings, stunted pepper growth, how to grow peppers, overwintered pepper plant, pepper plants yellowing, pepper plants leaves curling, pepper plants curling leaves, aphids on pepper plants, pepper plant growing

Id: Na8wJ9UeBdk

Length: 6min 52sec (412 seconds)

Published: Fri May 12 2023