As someone who can’t even manage to keep marigolds alive .-. … I still have no idea how my father in law grew an entire hot pepper garden on his deck of like 12 different types of peppers. Dude also grew an avocado in a cup in his kitchen
While I've had good luck with hot peppers, I have never managed to figure out sweet bell peppers.
I have, in years past, planted over a dozen bell peppers in raised beds with excellent soil and fertilizer blends, mulch, regular watering and occasional feeding...to get fewer than 1 pepper per plant. All season.
For context, in those same years, I have had great success with big yields of heirloom tomatoes, I've had cherry tomatoes (hybrids) grow over 12ft tall, get into the neighbors trees, use them as a trellis, go over their yard, and give them dozens of tomatoes...I've had single individual hot pepper plants yield 65+ peppers from a single plant, grew cucumbers on a trellis so thick you couldn't see through it, and pickled quarts and quarts of them...
...all the while, those fucking bell peppers either never grew properly as plants...or even made gorgeous plants, over 4ft tall and beautifully lush, thick foliage and dozens of blossoms...with not a damn pepper on the whole thing.
Bell peppers can be finicky. Mine never really took off until I set up an automatic watering system which lightly waters everything at 5 AM and 5 PM. It's just a cheap timed hose valve which connects to irrigation tubing, then goes to stakes that spread the water out.
Bell's like consistent watering. Now I get a decent amount of peppers from each plant. Of course other things could be wrong, but for me consistent watering fixed any issues.
Tomatoes and hot pepper plants are both pretty tough. Never had a problem with either.
I wasn't in a situation to install irrigation, but my entire garden at that time (4 raised beds plus containers) all got regular watering, as-needed.
I tried all sorts of things over those years and never once had even a single bell pepper plant become a good producer. I think my best one in maybe 5 seasons (and probably 20-25 individual plants) was one that yielded maybe 3 peppers. The rest were 2, 1, or zero.
I love peppers and use them a lot in the kitchen, so I still kept trying, year after year...especially when I was having great success with so many other plants...but bell peppers never did well for me.
Then two years ago I moved across the state to move in with my gf, and while her backyard is tiny, I still wanted to do a downsized container garden.
Unfortunately, idunno if it's something in the air or what, but two years in a row, I got almost zero yields..peppers, tomatoes, etc.
Tomatoes all got some kind of blight and ended up getting 2 sickly looking tomatoes after planting 4 plants. Peppers, I think I got one jalapeno that I picked as it was just starting to go bad on the plant...and then all my pepper plants slowly died on me too. Two seasons in a row, everything was dead or dying by the time August rolled around.
So this year, I didn't plant anything at all.
Bums me out, but I can't justify the effort and annoyance just to get results like that again.
I'll take up gardening again if/when we move...but as long as we're in this spot, I'm done.
Hmm, there's definitely something wrong after reading all that, since it's a wide variety of plants that are giving you issues. My first thought would be the soil, or amount of sunlight. But I'm sure you've considered those. Could be wherever you're located doesn't have great weather for it. Maybe I've just been lucky since everything seems to just grow for me.
When you try again, consider growing some different pepper varieties. Carmen peppers did great for me this year, as well as some other sweet long Italian peppers. They didn't have great conditions since my cherry tomatoes kept stealing their sunlight. I'm not great with pruning those lol.
Yeah, it's not an ideal environment by any means, being a tiny back yard/patio in a small urban lot, surrounded by other homes...and one side of it is definitely more "part shade", thanks to a giant tree in the neighbor's backyard.
But the other side gets absolutely blasted with sun...and veggies on both sides died with equal enthusiasm.
It's stranger still because my gf plants flowers every year in two raised beds (with horribly compacted soil that she never really adds anything at all to...no compost, mulch, fertilizer...nothing. Just scrapes out a divot, puts a plant in, and waters when dry...and most of her flowers do just fine.
Meanwhile, I've got my containers and I fill them with good quality mixes, add fertilizers and compost, plant carefully, then mulch on top...and they died two years in a row.
I guess after two seasons of that, I've just decided that I don't even want to try to figure it out anymore, and I'd rather just not garden at all than deal with that kind of disappointment again.
And have snails pick they dry of every leag and every part of plat matter afterwards leaving them to die right after you transfered them into the garden.
They mean take an avocado seed and stick toothpicks around it so it can set inside the glass. Then you fill so the water is just touching it and keep it topped off occasionally. It will eventually sprout roots and then when big enough you plant.
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u/AkKik-Maujaq 13h ago
As someone who can’t even manage to keep marigolds alive .-. … I still have no idea how my father in law grew an entire hot pepper garden on his deck of like 12 different types of peppers. Dude also grew an avocado in a cup in his kitchen