It's been a frustrating few days down here in Bunno. Probably 3-4 hot days of solid strong easterlies - day and night. My shadecloth keeps a lot of it out, but there's still a lot of the usual leaf scorch that I see on my balcony. Lots of leaf drop and 80% of my plants have zero open flowers now.
Still have some of those ones I described that came back well from last year but seem to have shut down into sticks with a handful of thick, leathery leaves. My Hungarian Black is a classic example. The thing is flowering like mad and is one of the few things holding fruit but it wont grow even if I keep knocking off the fruit to give it energy. On a positive note, it had been looking a bit yellow from the middle working outwards and following the chart that Micca put up I gave it some Dolomite Lime for magnesium and it, at least, seems to have greened out.
I have a Jamaican red with wildly distorted leaves - no visible pests beyond the odd aphid. Possibly getting slightly warped by the sun/wind combo and not being in the ideal location.
My gorgeous huge Chocolate Bhut is losing many leaves. I've pruned off a few spindly, bare twigs in the hope of giving the plant some energy reserves to set some of the billion flowers it has dropped. No flowers on it now but plenty of buds coming.
Butch T had set one pod which went all soft and dropped off. No flowers for it at the moment, either - buds on the way back.
About the only thing that has set fruit is my Fatalii which has three small pods. The plant itself seems to have stalled out in recent weeks.
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One thing I guess I have to keep in mind is that at this time last year I had just moved in to this apartment and all I had on my balcony was a few pots of tiny, tiny seedlings - so I am well in advance of where I was back then. Despite this, I can't help but get depressed about the fact that my plants seem to have regressed as summer has well and truly kicked in. Why do some of them seem to have just stopped growing? Why the leaf drop?
I can't tell if I'm overwatering. I try not to water the pots every day, but on a hot day they go limp as anything without at least a bit of water.
Meanwhile, here's my mate's (Leafcutter bee - who I can never get to post!) Cheiro Goias that I gave him as a scrawny runt of a seedling that I had no space for at the end of last season.
Jealous.
