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Help me before my season is ruined

This is my second season of growing peppers and I'm off to a rough start. I have been feedings my plants with distilled water, pure blend grow and pure blend bloom per instructions. A lot of plants are losing their blooms and to me healthy leaves are dropping. Now the leaves seem to getting these brown areas and some plants have black dots on the stems. What do you guys and gals think?





 
  Oof.  I am sorry, and good luck to you and your plants!  I don't know about the black spots - maybe a disease? maybe not much to worry about? try gently wiping them with rubbing alcohol to find out if they're lesions on the stem itself or some kind of surface residue/sooty mold - but my plants tend to lose leaves and flowers when they're under attack by insects.  Have you checked under the leaves for anything like whiteflies/whitefly eggs, or aphids, or scale bugs?  If you see a ridiculous number of ants climbing up and down the stems, that could be a tipoff that they're farming sap-sucking insects.
  But I did notice that the leaves in the second photo look really crinkly.  Unless that's normal for your plants, I'd give them a bit more calcium.  It's probably not the cause of the leaf/flower drop, but in moderation, it probably won't hurt and may make them happier.  (My habaneros usually get crinkly leaves when I've forgotten to give them their vinegar-dolomite solution recently.)
 
  Not to throw lots of questions at you, but other things that might contribute to the leaf/flower dropping - how's the weather?
  (Also, you can probably get away with giving your plants straight-from-the-tap water instead of distilled, unless your local tap water is really a nightmare.  If over-chlorination is an issue, you can always leave a container of water out in the sun for a few hours to let most of the chlorine evaporate.  Not that distilled water would necessarily hurt your plants, it just tends to be much more expensive than tap...)
 
  Ah, sorry, clarification - scale bugs are often on the stems, not really the undersides of leaves, and I usually find aphids on the tops of leaves, but I didn't see any in your pictures, so the undersides are the next place to check.
 
Thank you for the reply. I did have an aphid attack about a month ago and wiped them out with dawn and water mix. It's been a pretty wet spring here in TX lately, but my plants are in fabric pots with great draining soil and seem to have relatively dry soil. Maybe it's still too much water? I was planning only using distilled water until I have a healthy root system established, I had used some mykos and didn't want to kill them off with the chlorine in the tap water.
 
I also had a nickel size, unripe green healthy looking ghost that dropped off the plant just like a bloom or leaf.
 
My plants have had that disease before, you can rebound from it with some aggressive management.
 
With a title like "Help me before my season is ruined" you might be ready for the big guns:
 
For diseases bacteria and fungus: Agri-mycin
 
02-0151.jpg

http://www.domyownpestcontrol.com/agrimycin-17-p-12515.html
 
For pests: Bayer Complete Insect Killer
eabb94be-2bf1-4ff5-84f9-5d28ebea714a_1.10405612376d05ca1f9ab7191acc36a4.jpeg

https://www.lowes.com/pd/BAYER-ADVANCED-Complete-32-fl-oz-Insect-Killer/3033912
 
For Viruses: Sorry man
RIP_iStock_000013987544XSmall.jpg

 
 
Gjb89 said:
Thank you for the reply. I did have an aphid attack about a month ago and wiped them out with dawn and water mix. It's been a pretty wet spring here in TX lately, but my plants are in fabric pots with great draining soil and seem to have relatively dry soil. Maybe it's still too much water? I was planning only using distilled water until I have a healthy root system established, I had used some mykos and didn't want to kill them off with the chlorine in the tap water.
Tap water, even city water that's been treated, won't hurt your plants. I'd save your money on the distilled water, stop using fertilizer, and just use tap water as needed.
 
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