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UGH! My pepper plants are dying! The leaves are curling up and falling off rapidly.  It's been super hot here in Kansas and I have shaded the plants.  Was thinking back to what I've done recently... I was sprayed the plants last week with worm tea. After I was done, noticed a slight smell.  (Dumped the batch.) Don't know if it is the heat or the bad worm tea. I don't see any bugs or fungus. Even with a magnifying glass. Suggestions??  Any chance they will recover?? 

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Cheryl - what kind of peppers are you growing? Here in Phoenix, AZ I grow Bells,Habenjero,Anaheim, and Poblano in our intense heat. I let them get a little thirsty but in the summer I have to water every other day. Presently some are in bloom and some are ready to pick. I have not had a season with hydroponics yet, but in my test bed they are not doing as well. Time will tell. Good luck!

Hey Robert... I have several. Red, yellow and green bell. Banana, Anaheim, Cayenne and Jalapeno. The bells and banana are suffering the most. The hot peppers are fairing a little better. All were doing really well until the 100+ heat came. Our system has been running approx 2 months now. When I first planted them, they dropped some leaves and looked sickly. Added some and liquid seaweed extract and chelated iron. Within a week they had started growing new leaves and really started taking off.  I shaded them last week, but am now wondering if it was too much shade. Moved the shade late yesterday afternoon and this morning they've perked up just a bit. But not much. I've lost two plants so far, and looks like a few more are on their way out. I take pictures of the plants every Friday, and man... it's depressing! They looked very healthy a week ago!! This is our first go with AP... been same bumps in the road!  Fish died...lost all of my squash, zucchini and cucumbers to aphids. Now the peppers. But on the upside... the tomatoes are really taking off! I do love it though! It's a HUGE science experiment!!  Will be glad when I have a few years experience, but have learned a LOT so far! Are you doing hydroponics or aquaponics?

@Cheryl - I have been following the maxim that peppers like to get thirsty before watering. Maybe you could adjust the flood cycle to flood less frequently.



Cheryl Laird said:

Hey Robert... I have several. Red, yellow and green bell. Banana, Anaheim, Cayenne and Jalapeno. The bells and banana are suffering the most. The hot peppers are fairing a little better. All were doing really well until the 100+ heat came. Our system has been running approx 2 months now. When I first planted them, they dropped some leaves and looked sickly. Added some and liquid seaweed extract and chelated iron. Within a week they had started growing new leaves and really started taking off.  I shaded them last week, but am now wondering if it was too much shade. Moved the shade late yesterday afternoon and this morning they've perked up just a bit. But not much. I've lost two plants so far, and looks like a few more are on their way out. I take pictures of the plants every Friday, and man... it's depressing! They looked very healthy a week ago!! This is our first go with AP... been same bumps in the road!  Fish died...lost all of my squash, zucchini and cucumbers to aphids. Now the peppers. But on the upside... the tomatoes are really taking off! I do love it though! It's a HUGE science experiment!!  Will be glad when I have a few years experience, but have learned a LOT so far! Are you doing hydroponics or aquaponics?

All of ours are in the soil, not in our AP. We're growing bell, poblano, indian finger, hungarian wax, chile and cayenne. All are doing well; I can't say I let them dry out at all this time of year, but I, too, am in the AZ desert.

The bell is having a harder time than the others, though. We have more heat here than you do, but not the humidity. Do you think it could be related to humidity?

Hi Cheryl, some pictures and/or a bit more detail might be nice, since there are a number of different (visual) ways a leaf can curl...Some are indicative to viral diseases, some are related to physiological stress...and hopefully your's is just a bit of heat and the curling of leaves that happens right before plants go into reproductive mode and begin to create nodes that will become flowers, and become short on phosphorous. (It takes a LOT of energy for them to start flowering, and plants will pull phosphorous out of their leaves and send it over to the newly forming budding nodes, causing the leaves to droop and curl. Most all flowering plants seem to do this more or less when phosphorous is in thin (though not critically so) supply...

Bells and bannana's need way more 'energy' and have much higher nutrient requirements than cayennes and most other hot peppers...this might explain why the seem to be suffering the most...but again a picture is sometimes worth a thousand words

About that old maxim... I've grown many, many peppers in DWC where the roots are constantly submerged in water 24/7 and they've done fabulously...so I just don't buy that anymore. I used to adhere to that maxim though...Also, in the dirt garden I'm irrigating tomatoes that are huge and ripening along side peppers that are just starting to flower. My irrigation scheme is for the 300 tomatoes (which currently drink alot of water and DO NOT like big variations in moisture levels), the peppers have been getting the exact same treatment and don't seem to mind one bit. So I don't think I'll be customizing irrigation patterns between certain cultivars any more...

May be the heat.  The chemical processes involving chlorophyll break down and stop in temps over about 100, so even well watered plants will shrivel in a really hot spell.  Some are more prone this than others.   Peppers often need shade in the hotest part of the day.  

Hey Vlad... You're right, a picture is worth a thousand words!! Here's a picture of the pepper plants on 6-22, looking healthy and a picture of this morning. (same plant) Sad... just sad.   Also included a picture of one of the roma tomatoes.  Only one plant has started curling leaves and looking bad. The rest are doing quite well.  My cucumber, which wasn't very big, has completely disappeared as well as one of the squash. Maybe they were just too young and tender for the heat.

At this rate, I'm going to have hot peppers and tomatoes only! Guess I'll be making a lot of salsa! LOL!

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Wow...that really does look pretty bad...forget what I said earlier about hoping it was just physiological leaf curl...or pre-reproductive phosphorous curling...damn... not to rub it in, but you sure are right... that pepper's in bad shape. Now, I hope that rick is right...but those types of distortions do not look like any type of heat stress that I've been privy to see (which doesn't necessarily make it not so)...but if I had to make a call, I'd say that looks like Fusarium or verticillium wilt (fungal that can become a problem after some kind of stresses, like excessive heat and transpiration or after foliar feeding 'unprotected')...The wilted leaves are staying attached to the plant, no?...They are probably not falling off I'm guessing?

If it was all of your Roma plants I'd be an optimist and say, run of the mill physiological leaf curl that some varieties are more inclined to exhibit...especially if over watered, it's a harmless type of 'leaf curl'...but peppers and tomatoes are both in the Solanum genus and are susceptible to many of the same diseases. One year a hoop-house of mine got bombed with this fungal wilt, I thought at first that it was just the heat. I was wrong. It sucked.

Foliar feeding without some type of fungal protection (like potassium bicarbonate, there are others but they are generally not fish safe) is risky business. Really anytime you wet the leaf it is much more prone to pick up such a fungus problem.

I hope I'm wrong on this one...

A 'good' batch (non-stinky) of homebrewed worm tea though is suppose to create a 'microbial web' (it is written) and might not need and anti-fungal additive element though...

Hello Cheryl,

Heat is certainly a factor. Being kept dry or excess water (bell siphon etc), probably not such a big factor. Usually found a combination of factors: that either they became infected with some disease from adjoining plants, bad seeds - seedlings, not planted close enough to enjoy humidity, bad soil/rock.

Unfortunately at this stage I think it is too late for the plant. Personally I would remove the plants and dig around the root area to see if you can see any bugs/unusual build up. You can try to cut back to the stem and plant in fresh soil (not in the same system), and see if they recover. I know that they say there is no plant rotation in Aquaponics...I agree for raft based systems as you always have new media the plant is started in. I am not so sure of this in media based grow beds. Try planting your new peppers in a different media bed or area.

Please share the results if you do this.

God bless,

Yeah... pretty depressing! I think it's a combination of rookie mistakes that has lead to their demise! Starting with bad worm tea. I made a new batch, without cleaning out the bucket. Didn't even think about it!  I read about that the other day, and DUH!!!! After I sprayed all of the plants,I noticed a slight smell and immediately dumped the batch. The other plants have done OK after that, though. Then I shaded them... but think it was too much shade. And because of the heat, I kept the beds flooded for the hottest part of the day to try to the excessive heat transfer back to the fish tank. The leaves started curling and yes, they are falling off. Some have very few leaves at this point. Who knows which thing or combination of things I did has done them in! 

I moved the shade and the top, newer leaves perked up. There was a glimmer of hope. But then... my husband, who was trying to help, and who knows nothing about gardening, (he engineered the system, I tend to it) bought a mist-er thing yesterday. Hooked it up to the garden hose and set it by the plants. Yes,I bit his head off!!!  STOP!!! Spraying chlorinated water all over my grow beds!! No wonder my cucumber and a squash plant disappeared over night! 

I don't know... thinking I should start some new seeds, or try to find some plants... or just give up on the peppers this year!  I lost all of my squash, zucchini and cucumbers to aphids/ants a couple of weeks ago. Started that bed over. The zucchini is doing pretty well, so far. The 4 cucumber plants have died. Had snow peas that started to take off, then died.

Had this delusion that AP would be problem free gardening!!! HAHAHA!!! SO WRONG! Oh well... I learning!!  That's always a good thing!! 

Yeah, well the important thing is to not get discouraged, and just do it again and again. Every fail is pretty much a real good learning experience IMO. As you figure out old problems and get a handle on them, new ones crop up, but then you learn from those too. And every incarnation of what you are doing just gets better and better as you go...Gardening, in all it's forms, is a great hobby IMO. Though, I doubt that a "problem free" variety exists hehe.

I think that Sahib's advice is very, very sound.

@Sahib, good call on my last winter's mysterious/unknown hot yellow pepper species. Turns out they are physiologically (and in taste/heat) identical to (red) cayennes, except that they are yellow. Just like you called it before they were ripe. I didn't even know that there existed a yellow cayenne. The plant in my 'torture test'(s) system is still plugging away and pumping out peppers (again now that I've 'let' it) 8 months later in various horrendous conditions...it looks like Charlie Brown's Christmas tree, but geesh can that plant take some abuse. Good call.

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