Hello,

Today I bought a sickly looking "Bulgarian Carrot" hot pepper start on sale (all the vegetable starts being more or less in horrible shape and on layaway this late in the season). It is a leggy plant that has been in a 4-inch nursery pot for most of it's sad life. All of its foliage is very yellow; the branches on the bottom 2/3rds of the plant have been pruned off, and there are not a whole lot of leaves near the top. It has four or five green fruit around 1/2 to 3/4 of an inch long, and several flowers, some of which fell off easily when I barely touched them. The stem is pretty dry and rubbery.

Normally I grow stuff from seed and take good care of it before transplanting, so I am not sure how to handle this abused specimine. I'd like to transplant the poor thing into a 3-gal container or maybe something bigger. From what I have read here, pepper plants often do not form new roots along the stem, but planting deep doesn't hurt them, so is it correct that I should bury a large part of the leggy stem? Is there anything else I can do to help it out (remove fruit + flowers, give it a WoW, etc.)?

I don't expect the plant to do exceptionally well, but I want to see if I can get it to recover and produce just a few ripe chilis before the end of September (which is when it generally stats to be too cold for these things to keep going).

Thanks for the expertise!