The next item (and most upsetting) in my list of gardening incidents, failures, etc. is my pepper plants. I stared about 20-25 seeds and ended up with a good solid 14 or so very healthy nice looking seedlings with no problems at all (after thinning out an almost 100% germination). A few of them did not take well to the transplating to their final homes (one, at least, was my fault...tore the roots). After the transplating fun, I still had 11 very healthy plants with no issues. The problem began when the first buds showed up and eventually opened into beautiful flowers. Unfortunately, that's as far as all 11 of my plants ever made it. I don't know if it's because I used the generic Burpee Hot Pepper Seed pack or if I had bad soil or what. I never found out what attracted hundreds and hundreds of little tiny devils to these plants. Spider mites is what I found out they were after a bit of research. I first tried my Liquid Sevin (several different times, more concentrated and more often each time) with no luck. I continued to have no success getting rid of the #&$@# spider mites! I tried 2 other pesticides, neem oil, tobacco, soap solution & a few other things that were suggested. The only thing that worked a tiny bit (not nearly good enough though) was the Neem Oil. It got rid of about 25% or so of the mites. Every single time a bud would open they'd be all over it...hundreds of them. Then, it got to the point where they wouldn't even wait for the bud to open. It'd just start turning lighter color & they were all over it and all over most of the plant just sitting there waiting for more buds...grrrr! . Finally, it got the point where I was so upset that I tossed 10 perfectly healthy looking plants. =( I kept one, the one you will see in the pictures below. The plant continued to grow extremely well, but was continually slaughtered by the spider mites. They never spread to any of my other plants, even my bell peppers which were quite close to the hot pepper plants. Any help, suggestions, etc. are definitely welcome on this post, as I do not want to go through this heatbreak again this year. I'm using different, higher quality pepper seeds & probably a different potting mix too. Maybe i'll just get lucky and things will be better.
Here is a picture of one of my failed transplants. I pretty much ran out of pots & had to use this inadequately spaced container for a few plants. Obviously, it's not deep enough or even wide enough for a pepper plant...
Here is the picture life of what ended up being the last remaining pepper plant in my vegetable garden...
The spider mites started showing up a day or so after this picture was taken...
Look at how beautiful this plant became...only to never produce a single pepper...
The mites were all over this thing by this point (late July)...you can see a few browned buds dead due to their presence beforehand...
No lesson learned on this one yet as it's still a mystery. While writing this post, I thought of one possible cause. I started my pepper plants while I was still living alone with my uncle in a 100+ year old house...very possible they could have come from there. I plan on fully sanitizing all my pots I used last year before sticking any plants in them this year.
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