We've recently taken all our peppers for this year's (very short & Swedish) growing season in, bought a 4 by 4 tent and some sweet LED panels and set up a winter-production trial. It's going to be awesome if it works out as planned!
However. Our Padrón pepper plants all showed severe issues and I love frying these fruits. I feel that I should start with their background before moving onto the current issue (but skip if not interested):
They got hit really hard by a local, immense, aphid invasion. Other varieties also got hit but not nearly as bad. We're talking immense chlorosis and leaf drop with huge nesting areas of the suckers.
When we brought them in they showed black streaks and black spot streaks along many stems with black spots on leaves in direct connection to those. I know what paranoid growers are now thinking: Verticillium (or other blight/fungus wilt disease)! However, we did decide this was not the case. Why? Because it all started at the leaf tips and migrated downwards with no internal penetration when stems were cut. Also, no real wilting.
So, probably just some surface rot brought on by weakened plants, right? The kind you can get when you try to root too small cuttings? Our solution was to cut down all these affected leaves and stems immensely to bring the possible pathogen away and let them start "afresh" in the tent. We figured with strength this pathogen should not be able to recolonize them.
Or intervention seemed to work fine. New shoots appeared and they seem to love it, as do all other plants in the tent. But now we noticed that we have speckled chlorosis on some leaves we left on the plant (not new shoots). I don't know if it was there when we cut them down or not, but probably not as pronounced. So now the empathetic plant hypocondriac in me is telling me: It's a virus from the aphids! Run!
My question: Would you say it's a virus? I'll attach a picture here:
More in album: https://imgur.com/a/CxLzK
The wife is quite adamant that it is not because it's not a classic mosaic pattern and the chlorosis seems to be originating at the tips. This is how TMV, for example, is supposed to look on pepper leaves:
Note how you can "see" the virus colonies and it's randomly distributed. So, is it nutritional deficiency, transplant shock or something else stressy but very benign? Or should we start getting worried for the rest of our peppers? I'd really like to avoid moving these Padróns out of the tent since they really need the light right now.
However. Our Padrón pepper plants all showed severe issues and I love frying these fruits. I feel that I should start with their background before moving onto the current issue (but skip if not interested):
They got hit really hard by a local, immense, aphid invasion. Other varieties also got hit but not nearly as bad. We're talking immense chlorosis and leaf drop with huge nesting areas of the suckers.
When we brought them in they showed black streaks and black spot streaks along many stems with black spots on leaves in direct connection to those. I know what paranoid growers are now thinking: Verticillium (or other blight/fungus wilt disease)! However, we did decide this was not the case. Why? Because it all started at the leaf tips and migrated downwards with no internal penetration when stems were cut. Also, no real wilting.
So, probably just some surface rot brought on by weakened plants, right? The kind you can get when you try to root too small cuttings? Our solution was to cut down all these affected leaves and stems immensely to bring the possible pathogen away and let them start "afresh" in the tent. We figured with strength this pathogen should not be able to recolonize them.
Or intervention seemed to work fine. New shoots appeared and they seem to love it, as do all other plants in the tent. But now we noticed that we have speckled chlorosis on some leaves we left on the plant (not new shoots). I don't know if it was there when we cut them down or not, but probably not as pronounced. So now the empathetic plant hypocondriac in me is telling me: It's a virus from the aphids! Run!
My question: Would you say it's a virus? I'll attach a picture here:
More in album: https://imgur.com/a/CxLzK
The wife is quite adamant that it is not because it's not a classic mosaic pattern and the chlorosis seems to be originating at the tips. This is how TMV, for example, is supposed to look on pepper leaves:
Note how you can "see" the virus colonies and it's randomly distributed. So, is it nutritional deficiency, transplant shock or something else stressy but very benign? Or should we start getting worried for the rest of our peppers? I'd really like to avoid moving these Padróns out of the tent since they really need the light right now.
