• Do you need help identifying a 🌶?
    Is your plant suffering from an unknown issue? 🤧
    Then ask in Identification and Diagnosis.

Pepper...fungus...problem...bark?

cb1ocker

cb1ocker

Has anyone seen something like this on their peppers before? It looks a lot like bark. This is a cayenne I pulled off the plant today. It seems to be happening on nearly all my varieties, though not on every plant, and only about 1 pepper on any plant it's effecting. On some of the other pepers it looks a little more like blossom end rot than bark. Too much water maybe? I'm baffled.

2012-07-11%2014.48.32.jpg


Thanks in advance.
 
Was that side facing up? Looks a bit like the sun scald I get on a few where there wasn't much of any time of day that leaves were shading the area. I rarely (can't recall ever) getting BER on that type of pepper, it's usually something like a bell or very rarely a jalapeno. It's not BER if it's not on the end of the pepper, though it could still be sun scald on the end if it's a type of pepper that grows upside down.

Sun scald can take on various looks. The more thick, fleshy, full of water the fruit wall is, then the more likely it'll take a mushy look before drying out like that one did. If it is dried out like that, often I find the damage won't get any worse and the pepper can be left on the plant to ripen a bit more. For some reason the damage seems to start a chain reaction as can be seen on your picture, that the fruit starts to ripen around the damage and that ripening spreads to the rest of the pepper so it ripens faster.

IF water is involved as shown by the plant getting droopy then it would be a sign of too little water. I find that letting my leaves droop exposes the pods a lot more to sun.
 
Have you poked around inside the pods for larvae or anything?

IMG_5027.jpg


May or may not be the cause... but worth investigating though IMO.
 
Thanks for the responses. Dave you might be on to something with the sun scald. All the of the peppers that are currently experiencing this are showing it on the side that gets the most sun. Here in Wisconsin we just finished what seems like days and days of triple digit temps, so maybe that has something to do with it.

I'll cut into this pepper tomorrow morning just to make sure it's not one of those bugs. Hot or not, I don't think I could do it. :)
 
I finally cut into this pepper to see if it had bugs and it did not. I also looked at several of the other peppers that are experiencing this and it's actually on the shady side/bottom of almost all of them, so it might not be sun scald. I just added some composted chicken fertilizer that is high in calcium, hopefully it's just a deficiency that can be cured quickly. Does anyone know if over watering can cause this type of decay in the fruit?
 
^ yes both overwatering and underwatering (which depends on whether the nutrients stay in the soil the roots are in and get pumped up the plant at the right rate) are possible causes.

However we don't know all the details. Do you mean several of the other peppers on the same plant, on a separate plant, or even a different type of pepper plant? This is a general rot condition and on thin walled peppers will often dry out before spreading much. There are several things that can make a pepper start to rot, not necessarily the same cause for all of them though given the same environment, it is more likely the same cause except that BER is far more likely to affect thicker walled peppers, not so much the one pictured.
 
it's happening on my ghost peppers, cayennes, fataliis, trinidad scorpions and numex exlipse. but it's not on every pepper, only 1 or 2 on each affected plant. Varieties that are so far uneffected are my jalapeno, chocolate hab, takanotsume, omni color, cajamarca, and lemon pepper.
 
I'm out of ideas except for one. If you had some bird or animal roaming around sampling your peppers it could put a wound in one pepper, decide it doesn't like the taste and move on to try one from a different plant. Hard to say when the damage isn't seen immediately but rather only after the bacteria has spread.

All I can suggest is what you are already doing, adding the calcium, monitoring water levels, and keeping an eye out for further losses.
 
sounds good, i'll just keep an eye on them for now, hopefully the ferilizer and keeping them a little drier will help, thanks again!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top