Gardening: Answering a Reader Question

This week I got a message from a reader with a question about chiltepin plants, which I wrote about last week. The reader said she kept a bush alive through the winter. This year it grew to three feet tall. She sent me a picture of it and the plant looks great. However, she said the plant had not produced any flowers or fruit this year. She asked what could be the problem. As I wrote last week, I transplanted my chiltepins into pots from bushes I dug up at my great-grandmother’s farm in the spring. My plants began producing peppers several weeks ago.

I haven’t seen a wild chiltepin bush on my place in Cozy Corner in a few years. When I did have some growing wild, I recall them fruiting later in the year. I remember the bushes that grew on my great-grandma’s farm in Lavaca County always full with peppers at Thanksgiving. The plants on my porch could be producing early due to their confined roots. Or perhaps the porch provides a microclimate that encouraged them to fruit early. Or perhaps this reader’s plant has some kind of nutrient deficiency.

Pepper plants can fail to flower if they don’t get enough phosphorus and potassium. I suggested she try foliar feeding with MicroLife “Maximum Blooms,” a 3-8-3 liquid organic fertilizer. Mix the fertilizer concentrate with water in a pumpup sprayer according to the product directions at 2-4 oz. per gallon of water. Then spray the mix on the leaves of the plant. Make sure to spray the undersides, too. I prefer foliar feeding in this manner during the early morning when dew covers the leaves. Try this product with any plant to encourage blooming, especially on ornamentals. Pepper plants can also suffer from calcium deficiency. Peppers will still make flowers and set fruit with a lack of calcium. But the peppers will develop a soft, rotten-looking spot on their tips, similar to blossom-end rot in tomatoes. Finely ground egg shells provide an excellent source of organic calcium in the garden. MicroLife fertilizer products are made from a wide variety or organic materials and contain almost every micronutrient that plants need, including calcium. You’ll probably never see a calcium deficiency problem using MicroLife or similar products.