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First time grower looking for advice!

DayoftheGreek

DayoftheGreek

Hello,

I finally got around to growing some hot peppers this year, but I was limited to indoor growing. I have plenty of window space that gets light almost all day, so I looked up some easy to grow, good looking, decent heat chilis, and I decided on NuMex Twilight. The plants have recently started to lose flowers (and the stalks they were on!) so I quickly googled to find out that I need to pollinate the flowers by hand. Crisis one: avoided. No more stalks have dropped off. Now I realize this information would have been good to have from the start so I figure you guys are the best source of information on the web.

So I have a few questions. Should I be trimming my peppers to a certain height to make them grow out instead of up? I'm worried about trimming the top since the bottom has no flowers at all, they are all at the top. Does anyone know how tall numex twilight really gets? I have seen anywhere from 12" to 5' listed online. Do I need to fertilize? Keep in mind I am going for a trial run to get the fundamentals down, more than trying to have giant plants with tons of crazy hot peppers. I'll save that for next year. For now I just want to get a good number of healthy peppers. What size pot should I have them in? I want to keep them smaller and manageable for the window, but I don't want to damage the plants by accident with too small a pot. Maybe 2 or 3 leaves between the two plants have these strange dead spots on them. Some are in the center of the leaf, and one is along the edge. Should I be worried or is this normal?

Currently they are in pots that are 6" diameter at the very top, but taper down to 4". The plants themselves are about 20-22" tall.
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Thanks guys!
 
Definitely need a larger pot. I wouldn't use less than a 3 gallon, but 5 would be better. The smaller the pot the more frequently you'll need to water and feed them.
 
I'm curious about how to trim/prune a pepper plant properly. I didn't do anything with mine and they're a mess.
 
3 or 5 gallon pots on the way. I'll pick up the 5 gal if it looks like it will fit nicely in my window, but probably the three gallon.

Will this help the plants to grow outward at all, or will I have to trim them? Thanks for the replies so far.
 
Sure, a larger root base will help them bush out, but more light would help even more. When light is limited plants tend to stretch and become lanky. Without additional light it will be difficult to grow a really bushy plant in a window, but topping the plant will help.
 
Silver_Surfer said:
Sure, a larger root base will help them bush out, but more light would help even more. When light is limited plants tend to stretch and become lanky. Without additional light it will be difficult to grow a really bushy plant in a window, but topping the plant will help.
Click to expand...

What do you mean by topping the plant?
 
I wasn't aware peppers could be shaped like, say, a tomato. I didn't think cropping the top of a pepper would make any difference in width.

On the other hand, I've directly observed many times that peppers will take their width cue from the size of the pot. Somehow the plant brings its branches and roots into balance - the more space for the roots to spread out horizontally, the more the branches move out horizontally. Wider pot = wider plant.
 
Some nice looking plants so far...but you can almost hear them screaming for more root space.
I normally prune all my plants about a month before fear of first frost to let the existing fruit mature as much as possible.

Here's a site with some good info on pruning pepper plants:
www.ehow.com/how_5569820_prune-hot-pepper-plants.html
 
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