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Why so many pods?

BonniePepperRob

BonniePepperRob

Good people,

One of my orange habs recently tried pumping out over 300 pods at the same time. After a while,they became stunted, and the plant showed signs of mag and calcium deficency. I've corrected my fertilising regime now, and have pruned the plant right back.

My question is: why did my 18inch tall by 2 foot wide (kept that size via pruning) orange hab try to pump out in excess of 300 pods? :shocked: Is this common? Should i have been pinching off the flowers? Just seems like too many pods for one plant.

Here's a pic of the pruned branches and 274 pods (yes i counted them). There were also another 30-40 pods that i never pulled off cuz they were too small to bother with.

IMG_3914.jpg
 
Hi mate, This number is very common on the orange hab. the size of the fruit can depend on a number of factors.

Is the plant in a pot? If so what size?

What sort of sun does it get? and being winter, what sort of temps are you getting in perth at the moment cause the colder weather will give you very small pods..
 
Crikey, i had no idea an orange hab would commonly pump out that many pods. Its the first time one of mine has done it. Do u guys let em all grow or do u pinch off half of them?

Hey Moyboy, yeah its in a pot. Two orange habs share a 22cm w x 22cm d x 60cm L planter. I keep most of my chilli's in them. The chilli's i stop caring about eventually go in the garden beds and are at the mercy of my dogs. I use the plastic self watering ones u get from bunnings for about $22... maybe u know em.

Yeah, the pods slowed down once it got cold. Winter arrived about a month ago. Till then we'd had a lovely warm autumn. At the moment, max is about 19 deg with nightly mins of about 8-10 deg, although we had a night last week down to 2 deg. It'll get colder in the coming month, with 1 - 5deg min being common.. Lots of rain atm.
 
patrick said:
Murdered all of 'em.:( LOOK AT THE BODIES MAN!! You killed them, you killed 'em all!:(:(
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ahh ha ha ha ha!!! all that lovely green vegatative blood everywhere...

Like Arnie in the end of Commando "so what did u leave us John?"

"Just boaadies..." lol
 
Mate, 2 orange habs in one of those pots isn't a great thing at the end of the day...The plants will never do well as they will get root bound very quickly....

And in regards to pruning them back, you shouldn't really need to as a chilli plant will only grow as big as it's root system can handle. They are a good self regulating plant. they won't out grow there food supply.

I would suggest they you get them into proper round and deep pots and don't use self watering pots cause the roots of the chilli plant doesn't like being wet and you will end up with root rot.
 
Small pods can be caused by fertility problems, cold weather, and of course nutrient problems.

But a plant of that size should be more than able to produce lots of full sized pods, I think the reason it produced so many small pods is simply because the ones it was producing matured really early and it was able to produce more because of that.

When I have a plant produce a bunch of large pods and reach fruit load, it stops producing, it doesnt go on producing tiny pods.

It is to my understanding that a pod has only a limited time to grow before interal factors tell it to stop, and things like low temperatures and nutrient deficiencies cause them to develop slowly, and when the time runs out they simply stop growing.

If cold weather was not a factor, you should pinch all flowers and buds from the plant, try and fix any nutrient problems by flushing, repotting and reappling nutrients.

Good luck :)
 
moyboy said:
Mate, 2 orange habs in one of those pots isn't a great thing at the end of the day...The plants will never do well as they will get root bound very quickly....

And in regards to pruning them back, you shouldn't really need to as a chilli plant will only grow as big as it's root system can handle. They are a good self regulating plant. they won't out grow there food supply.

I would suggest they you get them into proper round and deep pots and don't use self watering pots cause the roots of the chilli plant doesn't like being wet and you will end up with root rot.
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Thanks Moyboy, but I need to keep my chilli's raised up out of doggie reach, and for that, the planters are a very convenient size.

Sometimes i shift the chilli's around in the planters. When i do that, i take a large serrated bread knife and cut the potting mix like a loaf of bread. I then dig down along the cut and lift out the chilli and roots etc. So far i've only ever seen the roots of a chilli (an orange hab actually) reach the base in any quantity once, and those roots were nice n strong n yellowie white.

I keep my chilli's pruned cuz i like em at a manageable medium size, it keeps the root system large compared to the plant that it has to sustain, and asthetically, i've always liked the look of two plants per planter.

With regards to root rot, i've not had that happen yet, but if it does, i can always drill some holes in the bottom of the planters to let the water out.
 
RichardK said:
Small pods can be caused by fertility problems, cold weather, and of course nutrient problems.

But a plant of that size should be more than able to produce lots of full sized pods, I think the reason it produced so many small pods is simply because the ones it was producing matured really early and it was able to produce more because of that.

When I have a plant produce a bunch of large pods and reach fruit load, it stops producing, it doesnt go on producing tiny pods.

It is to my understanding that a pod has only a limited time to grow before interal factors tell it to stop, and things like low temperatures and nutrient deficiencies cause them to develop slowly, and when the time runs out they simply stop growing.

If cold weather was not a factor, you should pinch all flowers and buds from the plant, try and fix any nutrient problems by flushing, repotting and reappling nutrients.

Good luck :)
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Yeah, a few months ago it produced about 30 really nice big fat ones. Towards the ripening stage of those 30, the plant then started putting out an absolute sh$t load of flowers... everything went strong (green leaves etc) until the plant was covered in small pods. Then it got too cold, too cloudy, not enough mag, not enough calcium, n it all went to sh$t.

Right now its about 6 inches tall :hell: Normaly i prune em back to about 12inches tall, but this time i cut it right back as kind of an experiment to see how it recovers. The plant is about 12mths old, and this is its 2nd serious haircut.
 
Well it all sounds pretty good on your part. What ferts are you using. Usually if it's high in nitrogen then the plant wouldn't want to flower as much so I don't think that's the problem.....

I really think it's the colder weather mate....my orange hab continued to fruit last winter and the pods where all the same general size as yours.

And if you want to do a major prune, the end of August is the time to do it as the temps are getting hotter again. regrowth will go crazy....
 
Moyboy,

Every two weeks i was applying 20 : 2.2 : 9 tomato food, and seasol. Once a month i was giving em fish poo from my pond and aquarium filters.

Eventually i guess they just used up whatever Magnesium and Calcium was in the original potting mix and ran out of puff. I was too heavy on the nitrogen and not enough Phos anyways.

I now feed em a much more balanced bi weekly concoction of 15 : 13 : 12.4 miracle grow all purpose plant food, blood n bone, mag sulphate, and potash.

I've also added gypsum clay breaker to the soil to bump up the Calcium. I feel the gypsum will also push the pH up, so in a week or two i'll retest the pH and bring it back down with some sulphur.

I still give em the same seasol and monthly fish poo too. Recently i also hit em with some chicken sh$t, and gave em a mag sulphate spray :)
 
I get tiny ripe pods similar to those in the pic in cold weather and usually they have no seeds - so the pollen must have been sterile or something, yet the pod didn't abort. Oh and the tiny ones are HOT.
 
caroltlw said:
I get tiny ripe pods similar to those in the pic in cold weather and usually they have no seeds - so the pollen must have been sterile or something, yet the pod didn't abort. Oh and the tiny ones are HOT.
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It's probably not the pollen being sterile, it wont set without being viable, it's just the seed never developed, cold weather can do that.

I have opened tiny pods to find, 0, 1 or even 10 seeds crammed into a berry!

I have never seen a full sized pod with no seeds in it though.
 
someone last year was saying the more seeds, the larger the pod....
 
My orange habs will usually have only about 6-8 seeds in them, even when really big pods, but a red hab or scotch bonnet will have many times that number. Dunno why...
 
BonniePepperRob said:
My orange habs will usually have only about 6-8 seeds in them, even when really big pods, but a red hab or scotch bonnet will have many times that number. Dunno why...
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The pod will only grow as large as it needs to accommodate the seeds that were vilable.

Of course things like genetics, plant nurtients, temperature and light levels can speed up or slow down the process. But generally the pod size tends to be in proportion to seed count.

In my case from the post above, I had really cold temperatures and this caused two things to happen, pods with no seeds due to very few viable seeds coupled with cold temperatures that caused slow pod growth. And the second thing that happened was, lots of viable seeds coupled with cold temperatures caused slow pod growth and a tiny pod crammed with seeds.

If the temperatures had been higher, I bet the first one with no seeds would have matured to a pod a bit larger with a few seeds, and the second one that was crammed with seeds would have reached almost full size.

It's very interesting to say the least, how peppers react to the environment around them!
 
maybe in my case its genetics, as i did get both orange habs from the same place together, but big fat summer pods from both plants, grown in the height of the growing season still usually only have 6-8 seeds. Its weird...
 
It sounds like a fertilizer issue to me. I had this problem with a lot of over-wintered plants and I think its because I had aphid problems and therefore fertilized very little. Now that I picked off most of the runt pods and am giving them a well balanced fertilizer, they are starting to grow normal again
 
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