health Black spots on over-wintered reaper leaves.

[R1dreamer]

I am currently over-wintering a reaper and iv'e noticed that black spots are starting to form on the leaves. Deficiency perhaps? I have not bee fertilizing him since i pruned him waaaaaaay back. He's growing a bunch of new leaves but only recently have the black spots formed.

 

[mrgrowguy]

uh oh, time to wave bye-bye.
 
J/P it may be nothing. I did, however, get the black spot on my reaper and it wasn't ever able to recover. But I didn't fight it too much. I just kept removing leaves and hitting it with H202. Was able to keep it at bay, but it spread to my TM Scorpion plant and that was the end of it for me.
 
Again, this may be nothing like the black spot disease I had, but it does look kinda similar.
 
Some guru will chime in, I'm sure.
 
 
Depending on how tied to that plant you are, you may consider removing all of the black spotted leaves (I see you have new stuff that looks healthy) and see if it comes back in the new growth over the next month. I say it this way because when you remove a lot of leaves like that, though it is likely to recover just fine, there is always an inherit possibility of the plant not being able to handle the added stress.
 
 
Then again, it could just be the plant using some of the nutrients from the leaves to get growing again, so it may be a deficiency like you said, too. But usually deficiencies start with yellowing lower leaves, then yellow new growth, then brown tips, etc, etc. Almost as if the plant is pulling the 'green' back into itself starting at the leaf tips. Though deficiencies do come in many shapes and forms...
 
Sorry that I may have just raised more questions than offering answers.
 
 
PS: safety measure, in case of black spot disease, try not to spray the leaves and let anything drip down from an infected leaf to a non-infected leaf. To help prevent spread. If it were my plant, I would just remove the infected leaves and hit it with a fungicide or at least a H2O2/water mix. Since it is going to be quite a while until the plant has ripe fruit again, I would probably use a systemic (my apologies to the organic growers out there  I used to grow organically, but stopped caring so much).
 
Good luck to you!!
 
PPS: I also wound't advise bringing that plant on-board a ship... not with the black spot.
...

 

[Jase4224]

Since it's not fruiting for a while you could hit it with Yates 'rose shield' or something similar which kills fungus, thrips, aphids and mites.

 

[R1dreamer]

Ok. I'm going to remove all foliage and get very aggressive with a copper / sulfur spray and perhaps h202. I won't let this guy go without a fight. I want him tip top by summer. It's not a bug problem for sure. I've checked very closely. I had a very bad case of aphids I couldn't beat until I got extremely aggressive with Dawn dishsoap. Any more comments would be much appreciated.
I'll look into this rose shield stuff. I imagine it uses a copper / sulfur for fungus