sun How important is direct sun?

[Dave2000]

What about when the temperature is around 95-100F? I live in Charlotte, NC and it's been in the high 90s to low 100s the past few weeks and I noticed my plants dropping a lot of blooms in this heat so I started only giving them about 2 hours of direct sunlight a day. They're still dropping blooms but not as many, but it's supposed to cool off soon so hopefully I can go back to 7-8 hours of sun a day. My chocolate hab hasn't had a new pepper since this heat started, and my others have only had a few new ones while the other pods seem to be developing slowly, so I'm not sure if it's the heat or lack of direct sunlight, I just read that these temps are not ideal during flowering.

Above 90F is a "potential" problem. Some plants will abort blooms or even early pods. However none of my peppers are doing this in the same temperatures you are seeing, only my okra is shedding buds, blooms and the vegetable itself.

I recently gave mine fertilizer including Cal/Mag and water very often. That may be helping, my biggest problem with them staying in the sun is it is scalding the fruit on the top. I don't have Choc. Habs but my Jamaican Chocs are thriving and producing new fruit every day, they get roughly 9 to 10 hours of direct sun, though possibly shaded a little by a row in front of them for the first hour.

They are resisting high temperatures better this year than last, even with this year being hotter than last, with the only differences I can think of being watering more often and using more Cal/Mag, though I might also have more peat in the soil this year along with last year's pepper root hairs.

 

[Wulf]

Well, I think everything's settled down now. No more sun damage to the plants and I've got the majority of them outside now. The scorp dropped a leaf, but already looks like it's growing a replacement set. The fluorescent purples seem to be creating a lot more pigment now that they're in the sun and they're getting to be a pretty deep colour.

Looks like it's just a race against winter now to see if I can eat the fruits of my labour.

 

[Capt Poopiepants]

Above 90F is a "potential" problem. Some plants will abort blooms or even early pods. However none of my peppers are doing this in the same temperatures you are seeing, only my okra is shedding buds, blooms and the vegetable itself.

I recently gave mine fertilizer including Cal/Mag and water very often. That may be helping, my biggest problem with them staying in the sun is it is scalding the fruit on the top. I don't have Choc. Habs but my Jamaican Chocs are thriving and producing new fruit every day, they get roughly 9 to 10 hours of direct sun, though possibly shaded a little by a row in front of them for the first hour.

They are resisting high temperatures better this year than last, even with this year being hotter than last, with the only differences I can think of being watering more often and using more Cal/Mag, though I might also have more peat in the soil this year along with last year's pepper root hairs.

When you say "better this year than last" do you mean the same plants as last year? I'm a very small time grower compared to most on this site (only 3 pepper plants this summer) and don't overwinter my plants, but I'm still surprised by how many blooms they're dropping. I give them a dolomite/epsom salt foliar spray in addition to fish fert every 3 weeks and water every 4-5 days in this heat, but figured they were just too young to produce fruit yet seeing as my 2 hab plants are right at 12 inches tall and my scotch bonnet (which has multiple pods on it) is about 18 inches tall. I just hope the 2 habs start producing pods because I plan on brewing a habanero IPA in late August or early September and want to use all my own peppers.

 

[Dave2000]

^ more or less the same plants, yes. With the same plants I have this year they seem at least equally able to cope with higher temperatures than last year. I don't claim to have planned it to work out this way, it's just an observation.
Watering every 4-5 days seems to me to be far, far, too little watering.
Watering isn' just about water, it also moves the nutrients into the plant.

I feel there are a lot of people on this forum who suggest a watering schedule that makes no sense. With well draining soil there is no good reason not to water every day, except that for practical purposes if the plants are in the ground instead of pots, then watering less often but deeper can conserve water a bit. Granted, it depends on what is in the soil that holds water, it's a bit of a juggling act to have water that drains well but also has particles that store water. I mean that in some environments the plant really doesn't need frequent watering but there seems to be too many people suggesting a watering schedule that is not conducive to healthy plants.

I don't know when you started your plants or how slow they have grown but I suspect you are starving them of water and nutrients... but on the plus side, any peppers you end up with may be hotter as a result.

To put it another way, my plants in the ground could probably struggle and survive stunted in growth with 4 days of no watering but my plants in pots would all be dead within 48 hours of no watering with the temperature between 95F-105F that persists here. However, this is still relative to the pot size vs plant size, I have no peppers only 18" tall or less now except for one that I gave up on and planted an okra in the same pot... lol, the pepper survived but the okra is now 6X the size while being 1/3rd the age and does a pretty good job of shading the pepper from getting sun.

 

[Capt Poopiepants]

^ more or less the same plants, yes. With the same plants I have this year they seem at least equally able to cope with higher temperatures than last year. I don't claim to have planned it to work out this way, it's just an observation.
Watering every 4-5 days seems to me to be far, far, too little watering.
Watering isn' just about water, it also moves the nutrients into the plant.

I feel there are a lot of people on this forum who suggest a watering schedule that makes no sense. With well draining soil there is no good reason not to water every day, except that for practical purposes if the plants are in the ground instead of pots, then watering less often but deeper can conserve water a bit. Granted, it depends on what is in the soil that holds water, it's a bit of a juggling act to have water that drains well but also has particles that store water. I mean that in some environments the plant really doesn't need frequent watering but there seems to be too many people suggesting a watering schedule that is not conducive to healthy plants.

I don't know when you started your plants or how slow they have grown but I suspect you are starving them of water and nutrients... but on the plus side, any peppers you end up with may be hotter as a result.

To put it another way, my plants in the ground could probably struggle and survive stunted in growth with 4 days of no watering but my plants in pots would all be dead within 48 hours of no watering with the temperature between 95F-105F that persists here. However, this is still relative to the pot size vs plant size, I have no peppers only 18" tall or less now except for one that I gave up on and planted an okra in the same pot... lol, the pepper survived but the okra is now 6X the size while being 1/3rd the age.

Thanks for all the info. I have them in 5 gallon pots of straight Happy Frog so I know they drain well, but up until 2 weeks ago all I had to do was water them every 5 days or so and let nature do the rest, but now the heat combined with no rain is causing problems. Seeing as I'm getting minimal results with my current watering schedule, I might as well water more often, because truthfully I want peppers, not leafy bushes. Sorry if I hijacked the OP's thread, but thanks for the help.

 

[Wulf]

No worries about hijacking the thread, discussion is discussion.

In a rehijack of my own, one of my plants has its first bug. It's a tiny spider, so I'll consider that good luck.

And I had my first "I'm dumb" pepper casualty among the runts on my table. They lost water quicker than expected today and were all shriveled up by the time I got home from work. I was silly enough to poke one ever so gently before watering them. All the others rebounded back so fast that I couldn't even tell they'd had a problem, but the one I poked remained shriveled. Apparently I broke its main stem with my poke....

Among the ones that went outside, most are doing well. My lack of hardening them off has resulted in more sunburned leaves than I'd like, but their growth is more than making up for the time it would have taken to harden them off. My peter pepper plant is the first one to hit the stage where instead of growing a single set of leaves from the top, one after the other, every single branch now has a tiny little leaf bud starting up simultaneously. Growth should be exponential any day now. I also got some replacement seeds for my chocolate habs from Pepper Joe, but I don't have much hope that they'll produce before winter hits. Still, should be easy enough to overwinter and be ready for production early next.