I used compost and dynamic lifter with a drink of fish emulsion and seaweed every week.
Composts and manures will grow great chile plants as well as improving your soil
All of the above are good to excellent, as long as you don't use them in excess. all plant no fruit. I like the fish emulsion; mix it weak and use every watering steady diet not gorge and starve once a week or so.
If you want production there is 2 very important steps, common knowledge to some, denuding and soil prep.
Denuding allows the energy to be put in plant growth at first and not to a few early stragglers. every time you pick a bud the branch splits 1,2,4,8,16
I denude my plants for 4 to 6 weeks (climate allowing) and then watch em go, as a general rule 6 to 12 fold maybe more.
Of coarse the easer the root go down the faster the plant grows, so make it deep and fluffy; leaves are an excellent source of humus, use a lot of um, they decay very quickly, till them in in fall and again in spring and watch out.
I use compost that was allowed to heat to a temp that kill the weed seed, you can see me using it here.link and the way that i use it there is no weeding! gota love that.
Sounds like you got a handle on it
Cheers, SC
By denuding do you mean pinching the growing tip? When is a good time to start doing this? I didnt think that peppers responded well to topping. But it looks like it worked for you.
I never use the same fertilizer. Feel free to correct my logic here, but i find that gardens get used to the same one. I have a few different ones that I alternate with every few weeks.
Triple Boost
Yates Seaweed
Aquasol and a bit of sulfate of potash
Miracle Grow Tomato Boost
And a few handfuls of dynamic lifter pelets every now and then scattered over the bed.
Hardly any yellow leaves - all a nice deep green colour.
Not topping, just remove the buds, can be tedious!!!!!!!
SC
This reminds me of the old debate (Whats the best oil for a Harley)
TomatoTone has everything peppers need to grow. If you look at the ingredients list on it, it contains pretty much everything that people talk about on these boards for pepper feeding - kind of an all-in-1 solution.
I use only TomatoTone and Neptune's Harvest fish+seaweed. The latter is great on other vegetables and greens, too.
Composts and manures should have loads of free beneficial microbes. Bokashi composting, or compost tea are other ways to introduce loads of beneficials cheaply