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plant-care Post your Potted Pepper watering and feeding and PH

Nute

Nute

There are so many potted peppers on this site that are super healthy. Inquiring minds want to know how you do it.

Please list if you are using a soiless or soil mix and if replicable and available what is in it.

Do you use tap water? RO water? PH balanced tap water?
What are you using to balance PH?
Do you fertilize each watering?

Is your soil so great you can use tap water for a long time with no leaf yellowing and no needing to add fertilizer?

If your soil balances PH which ingredient and how much is doing it?

My soiless mix:
Coco-Coir with nothing added. Just pure coco-coir.
At the moment 1/4 strength fertilizer with each watering is working well. They are watered until some runoff comes out.
The PH of the tap water is 8.0 and may make the leaves yellow if not ph adjusted.

At 1/4 strength the fertilizer does not bring the PH down below 6.8
some sites suggest as low as 6.2
To get this half RO water may be used as it does not buffer PH like tap water does. Its kind of a neat trick- without changing the amount of fertilizer you have the ablity to change the PH by mixing two types of water with different PH buffering levels.

In practice this knowledge is helpful to prevent off PH.
For instance you could fertilize with tap water usually then burn your plants with same same amount of fertilizer in RO water because the PH will be much lower.
"Today I will give them a treat and use bottled water with the fertilizer"- it may be 4.7ph where with tap it would be 6.5ph
 
I'm using Pro-Mix BX straight and fertilizing with Neptune's Harvest liquid seaweed and fish fertilizer once every couple of weeks. Other than that water with a hose. I used to check ph when my plants were younger, none anymore.
 
Same as PepperRidge except I'm using mostly manure for fertilizer. I often use lime in my soil too and use well water and rain water.
 
I use a mix of slightly composted mushroom compost peat pine bark mulch and perlite. I water with well water that untested but I know is loaded with iron. As for fertilizer BioBIZZ all the way!! grow plus bloom and somtimes alag-a-mic and topmax .
 
I am using 50% 60/40 compost/cushion sand and 50% of a standard potting soil I get from my local nursery (no added nutes)...my pH stands at 7.0 and I am using mostly city water for the plants with the exception of my "prize" plants which I am using rain water...I am having to water daily now and/or when the plants are sagging...I used Botanicare products to get the plants growing well, but it got too expensive for me to continue to use it on mature flowering/fruiting plants. The last nutes I gave the plants before the flowering/fruiting stage set in was plain ol' 12-4-8 Miracle grow liquid concentrate (about 1/2 gallon per plant after dilution). I side dress with Epsom Salts every two weeks, and feed every two weeks with Botanicare Cal/Mag plus, and now using vigaro 10-10-10 liquid concentrate half gallon per plant (after dilution, of course), between 7-14 days, depending on the nutrient levels of the soil.

I watch the pH, moisture, and nutrient level of my plants weekly and all seems to be going well.
 
Im also using similar.

3/4 Pro-mix BX, 1/4 extra perlite, a dash of dried out coffee grounds (chilies like some soil acidity..and bugs hate coffee) and Terracycle fert, it's a granular 5-3-4 with worm poop and other stuff. :)

Seems to work well so far. I am looking to try some extra Epsom Salts too for kicks.

I have no idea what the pH is around here, but we get our water from a huge aquifer system..so it's pretty good.

Edit: Ok, found a site that lists water quality nationwide.

National Tap Water Database
http://www.ewg.org/tapwater/index.php

Here's ours..eeep. Kinda scary, but better than some for sure.
http://www.ewg.org/tapwater/yourwater/system.php?pwsid=WA5383100

-QS
 
i use regular no fert prebageed soil with perlite. Neptunes Harvest seaweed fert and bonide fish emulsion and epsom salts. i use regular NJ tap water without any preconditioning. I used Miracle Gro on a few plants in the beginning, but i wanted to go without synthetic stuff this year. So far so good. Now if only i could get the peppers to fruit.
 
Oh, I forgot to say I usually nuke the tap water for a minute before using it in case of nasty little buggers. I've also been experimenting with crushing up a multi-vitavin in about a 1/2 gallon of water...plants seem to really like it...and it's cheaper than Superthrive. ;)
 
POTAWIE said:
Give it some vitamin B1, that's partly what the thrive products contain.
Click to expand...

Ya, it's a bottle of Super Plenamins Plus from Rexall that I buy for like $3 at local outlet store. Has everything under the sun in it including fish oils..mebbe why the plants like it.

Has Magnesium and all the B-vitamins too. Tried to find a label pic, as I can't get all of it in one photo.
 
I use regular potting soil mixed with perlite. (4:1)

Initially I used chili focus as a feed, but when I ran out I started with normal tomato feed.

Started spraying with opsom salt two weeks ago.
 
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