Looks like maybe some critter is taking bites? Squirrels, chipmunks, etc?

That would appear that something is eating on them to me also rjinga. In all that grass you are more likely to have grass hoppers or most any thing else that might find them attractive, or at least want to try them. I have never had a bird peck a pepper (nor peck a peck of pickled peppers either ":^) but that is almost what it looks like.

I think that to have any hopes of having any peppers to amount to anything much, you are going to have to do something about that grass, even if it is nothing more than take a weed eater to most of it and pull the rest by hand right around the plants.

That is kinda what my 15 year old grandson helped me do with mine. Like you, we had two months + of tropical deluges which let the grass get away from me on each side of the garden. If finally quit raining and truned off hot and dry, giving us a chance to work on it some.

I got a late start with my peppers and they had a struggle with the unusual weather and grass, but finally started producing heavily and I had several branches break off which were loaded down with peppers. They have out grown the short CRW cages that they were in so I have started stacking one cage on top of another like shown below. I still have some work to do on them, and that is some mild onion flavored chives that I left for the time being near one pepper plant. I also threw a couple of shovel fulls of compost and composted horse manure mixture around the base of each plant today and watered it down good. Mine usually produce heavily right up until frost kills them in the fall / winter.
Keep us posted on your progress.
Bill P.
{{gwi:103980}}

thanks for the quick responses. It seems we might be getting a break with the heat this next week, so I'll "roll up my sleeves, put on heavy gloves, and brave whatever temps (not to mention creepy crawlies) I might find out there.

Believe it or not, I had that garden spot 100% weed free when I started, and that stinking bermuda grass has crept back in, along with a bunch of other stuff....

so I'm on it...and I'll get every weed out of there, if it breaks my back....I am also going to implement a lasagna bed on the half of the garden where stuff has died back...so well see what comes from that.

I'm getting some GREAT sources of "material" for my beds, I just confirmed with a tree trimming company to get truck loads of their ground up waste from tree clearing and trimming jobs they do as it becomes available.

And I've become an expert "nighborhood bagged grass clipping sniper"

But I tell you weeds grow better than anything else I plant, feed, water and nurture...It's just so annoying.

My suggestion would be get up early, get a cuppa coffee and head to the garden...I hit the garden while it is still reasonably cool ..well not cool but not scorching hot. I try to get some weeding done every day...but I do it early before it gets hot.

rjinga

I thought my pepper plants had finished for the year after five peppers from two plants, but suddenly they're blooming again and making little peppers.

A suggestion for your weeds. Why don't you go get a lot of cardboard boxes from the grocery store, open them out, and lay them around your plants? Water them well so they'll cling to the earth and keep them damp. Or toss some soil on top. It'll kill most of the weeds and permit you to see what's going on.

I agree that it looks like something's been biting your fruit.

Have you fertilized them? They look to me like they need nourishment. My peppers are the darkest green plants in my garden, are loaded with ripening peppers, and are still blossoming and setting new fruit.

Your weedy grass is sucking nutrients and moisture from your soil, even if it was fertile at planting time.

Also, you say you have been picking off bunches of small, underdeveloped fruit? On my pepper plants, "small, underdeveloped fruit", no matter how close together, eventually grow into big, beautiful green bell peppers.

I never try to "outsmart" my plants. If they want to make lots of fruit, I trust them to know more than I do. My ancestors and I have no genetic experience or knowledge of fruit production.

If left to maturity, they then turn into beautiful, delicious red, gold, and orange sweet peppers. Then they get cut up and put into salads or shish-ka-bobs, or diced and frozen for lasagna, spaghetti sauce, and meatloaf, or stuffed whole with my meat loaf and frozen for winter consumption.

Tom

I think you still have time for more....after you weed, dissolve a teaspoon of epsom salts in a quart of warm water and spray thoroughly over all the leaves till they drip...on mine, it never fails to bring dark green to the leaves, new growth, flowers and good setting....good luck

Rjinga, I had the same problem this year with my peppers. And I don't have any grass or weeds around them, and I did fertilize all my vegetable garden plants. Interestingly, only two varieties of peppers out of 5 I've been growing this year had this problem. My explanation (I'm not an expert!) was the extreme heat and high air moisture we had this summer here, in Iowa.

annemarie...try the epsom salts....they really work! and you'll see it start to happen within a week

The first picture isn't quite clear but the second is a classic example of Heat stressed rot, same as Blossom End Rot on tomatoes. You are correct in removing the damaged fruit, including smaller shrivled fruit. Hopefully you will get enough moisture in the near future to provide for a later good fruitset from these plants.

You don't need another reminder of the competion of the grass but it isn't too late to smother it with vegetative mulch. Since the weeds will remain a problem next year you might want to try planting you '08 peppers on black plastic. I won't say that I'm not having similar problems to yours with drought conditions and no supplemental water but plants on plastic get a better start and are less threatened by weeds.

More bad news, not to these plants but to some kinfolk of theirs, happy planted in pots on my patio...the ones on the patio were doing laps around these in my garden spot, in half the time....THEN....(this is where the dom, dom, dom, dom, dom music would play) the potted peppers got plucked by some freakishly large cut worms....one of the two plants looks like edward scissor hands got ahold of it, and this happened literally today, I looked at them this morning around like 11:30 and then tonight (7pm) they were stripped....and I also found a tomatoe just around the corner from these, COMPLETELY stripped of it's leaves....naked...nothing left....this is so upsetting, I dont know who will see this, but I have to express my dismay and whine some...IF IT'S NOT ONE THING, IT'S ANOTHER!!!! (for any of you cut worm lovers out there, stop reading now).....because what comes next will make you upset.....I SQUASHED THOSE BUGGERS, AND GROUND THEM INTO THE GROUND....AND TOLD THEM TO TELL THE OTHER OF THEIR FATE IF THEY DIDN'T LEAVE WELL ENOUGH ALONE.

then I told my husband I'm just going to have to buy my produce from the farmer's market next year. SIGH

My first couple of peppers always seem to get this. I think of it as sunscald. When the plant overgrows the fruits and shades them, it seems to go away.

My 1st fruit this year just utterly shrivelled that way and the 2nd was 1/4 damaged. The rest seem to be coming along just fine and are reddening up beautifully.

I also sometimes wonder if the first fruits are just too early for the plant to support.

annemarie:

I am not an expert either. (this is only my 4th year gardening).

However, my experience has been that heat is not a problem with peppers. Mine never do much until temps hit at least 90 for a daily high. I set them out in May (80 degrees). They do nothing in June (90 degrees). Finally, in July (100 degrees) they start growing. Then, in August (105 degrees) they blossom and set fruit. September (90-70 degrees), they grow great. October (70-25 degrees) they ripen beautifully, and survive light frosts.

Humidity? I know nothing about that, except I spent a summer in 1968 in Lawrence, KS, where everybody just changed clothes three times/day because we felt wet all the time. Since 1968, I have lived in NWKS, where the humidity is usually 10-20%. Peppers are suposedly a tropical plant and should, I would think do well in a humid environment. But, they do better for me than any other plant.

I have never had an infestation of any insect or disease damage to my peppers. I get an occaisional grasshopper on them but they don't do any damage. My only problem this year was when hail stripped all the leaves off of all my pepper plants. Since then, I have some peppers with sunburn damage, but, I think I have at least 5 perfect peppers per plant on the 15 plants I have growing in "pepper row".

Tom