Help!! I planted several pepper plants in my garden this spring and now I'm troubled! They are full grown size now. The trouble, one day you walk out to the garden and they have wilted. Yes they have been watered enough, but they certainly look as though they need watered. The next day you walk out and look at the peppers and boom, the plants are droopy and limp! It started with one of my Corno di Toro plants in the early summer before fruiting so I uprooted the plant and burned it in a campfire. OK so it's one plant it'll be OK right? About 3 weeks later, now mid summer and with 4 inch peppers on the plant, the plant (also Corno di Toro) next to where I did the uprooting shows the same symtoms. Peppers on the plant, I left it and they ripened even though the plant died. NOW out of 8 Corno di Toro plants all but one are limp! OUCH!! I had been thinking it to be limited to just these peppers. NOPE!! Sunday I went out to look and now one of my 5 Cayenne pepper plants is showing the same signs! The cayenne pepper seeds were saved from some market peppers last summer, and, the Corno diToro seeds were purchase online. It's been a horrible year for bugs...squash bugs and Japanese beetles and this is the first year of gardening in this spot. I fear that the remainder of my plants are going to be next. Any help with this would be greatly apreciated!
The following link may help: http://ohioline.osu.edu/hyg-fact/3000/3122.html I have many peppers planted in pots. Only one wilted and then died. But I am not sure whether it is Fusarium or Verticillium Wilt. The root system of the died pepper never developed well - it might be the soil/water problem - becuase I know, the soil in this pot has a problem to let go water.
Some general ideas Timmylaz, what did the roots look like on the plants that you pulled up? I haven't had the same problem on my peppers, but I did have a pansy plant in one spot of the garden suddenly wilt. A few weeks later a lettuce near where the pansy had been suddenly slumped dead, and when I picked it up, it had no root. I thought briefly that I had some buggies that ate roots; I later worked out that it was a kind of fungus. I thinned out the plants in the area, worked cornmeal into the soil, and was careful not to let water stand on the leaves after watering; that cleared up that problem. I had a different problem on my peppers; black patches that I think are "black spot" fungus. The most effective treatment I found for that was the wormcastings out of my own worm bin. Compost tea, wormcastings, and cornmeal are my favorite disease preventives/disease treatments so far.
The roots were there, not too deep, but, this is the first year in a "lasagna" garden so the ground under the bed is very hard clay. I didn't notice any insect damage or anything out of the ordinary on the roots. I know this...I'm going home and putting cornmeal on the soil. I'll try anything!
Using cornmeal Mary, when I first searched for info on "black spot" I ran across the recommendation for using cornmeal as a fungicide. It's very popular in organic gardening circles: one reference is at http://gardening.about.com/od/naturalor ... rnmeal.htm According to about.com, cornmeal attracts and feeds the good-buggies, Trichoderma fungus, which drives off the bad-buggies that attack the plants. However it works, it works. It's a good particle size to be quickly broken down in the soil, nurturing all the good little buggies. That's one of the basic themes of organic pest control -- build up the good buggies to drive out the bad buggies. You do the same thing with compost, compost tea, worm castings, and worm tea. The other basic element is strengthening the plant so that it can fight off bad buggies on its own. I also gave my infected peppers some extra feeding with seaweed emulsion, in foliar spray. If your peppers are having a hard time getting roots deep into the soil, Timmy, they may benefit from a foliar spray -- feeding them through the leaves -- and/or a soil drench, mixing organic fertilizer (like a fish emulsion) with water to carry it quickly to the roots. The recommended rate of cornmeal for soil application is 2 pounds per 100 square feet; work it in and then water very very well. You can also simply dust the plant with cornmeal. I did that for a bit when I was worried about damprot. I think it is more effective, though, to work it into the soil or spray it on as cornmeal juice. (You can then work the damp cornmeal, that you strained out of the juice, into the soil.) It is supposedly cheaper to buy "horticultural garden" cornmeal in a garden supply store, than food-grade cornmeal at the grocery store. I haven't found it at my local garden store, and I have such a small garden that I can buy enough cornmeal for the year at the grocery store for a few dollars. I just buy the cheapest kind they have. The wrigglers in the worm bin love it, too. Just make sure you get cornmeal, and not corn gluten. Corn gluten is used to kill weeds.
Anitra, I have used cornmeal with great success. I put 1 cup of corn meal in a permeable bag, soak it in 1 gallon of water overnight and spray the plants regular household peroxide @ 1 cup to a gallon works very well also.
Sorry Imissed your post earlier Anitra, I'd never heard that about cornmeal but I'm very glad to hear of it now, thanks!!
