11.5 Weeks Pepper / 9 Weeks Tomatoes

Another eventful week. Here are the highlights:

Continued massive blossom/flower drop from all 4 plants. I have no idea why. Possibilities: insufficient nutrition....dehydration....low relative humidity in the vicinity of the leaves....disease....??? I have no definitive information, but I am pretty confident I let the tomatoes dry out too much (Peppers do just fine, but apparently the tomatoes have a different temperament...) Another strong indication that the tomatoes got too dry was this picture below...the dreaded BLOSSOM END ROT caused me to lose the 4 best little tomatoes I had growing!

 

 So now I am trying to be MUCH more vigilant with watering those darn tomatoes. To balance out the negative of losing tomatoes, I harvested the first of many Jalapenos...YUMM!!!!

 

Kendra using them in a Mexican dish she was preparing

Booooooo

 So this week I also gave the tomatoes a big pruning. The canopy was getting super dense, and they were really crowding out the peppers....which is pointless if the dumb tomatoes aren't even going to produce any fruit! The other thing I did was put the peppers on top of 5 gallon containers on the grow table. The tomatoes were getting so high relative to the peppers that the pepper plants were seriously almost 18 inches away from the grow lights....and when one of the limitations of flourescent grow lights is light intensity/penetration to begin with, I wonder if insufficient light COULD be contributing to the pepper blossom drop. I have no idea, but putting the peppers closer to the lights can't hurt.The other good news is that the leaf spot noted on a few pepper leaves last week has not changed/spread.

New look to the garden...

Peppers growing well! (the ones that don't fall off before getting this far, that is...)

Had to tie up this plant because more peppers on the one side caused the plant to tip over!

5 gallon container stands

The latest and greatest (and so far blossom end rot-free) hope for the tomato plants

Hard to see, but here is a picture of pepper blossoms/flowers that have just fallen off the plants for no apparent reason!