Before you start treating, get a diagnosis.

Got pics?

Dennis

Container soil is a much discussed topic. IMO that is *not* a good recipe. Go to the Container forum and research "5-1-1" mix. Read Al (tapla)'s article on container soils and drainage (on its 20th iteration, or thereabouts). You don't need to use a 5-1-1 mix, but knowing about it will help you decide what to use.

This post was edited by DMForcier on Tue, Oct 28, 14 at 15:07

No pics yet. Discovered the problem this morning while rushing out to work. (12 hour days of producing newscasts and setting up election-night computer systems have not given me much time to look at the plants.)

I will try to get pics tomorrow morning, if I don't run out of the house late.

The 5-1-1 makes a lot of sense. Seem like based on the little I know about pepper plants & water, it would be a good fit. I might have to give it a try. (Learning new things about these little guys is part of why I bought some seedlings at the botanical gardens plant sale last spring. I figured it would be fun to explore new territory and learn new things. So far, so good!)

Hopefully, I find time to re-pot this weekend. (I have a wedding to attend Saturday, and also need to go out of town to solve a computer problem for my mother. Too much to do.)

Sounds like you're a busy guy. You might want to try Miracle Grow Potting Mix in the short term, then work on tracking down all the 5:1:1 ingredients as you have time.

neem is like tsp in a sprayer bottle with water and mix it up and spray away, i don't think it can really harm the plant much(i used it this year but not against fungus).

Yellowing leaves is usually over-watering / bad soil drainage for newbie growers.

i'd say don't use 5-1-1 unless you have a fertilizer and schedule worked out as 5-1-1 contains pretty much 0 nutrients. Just adding some pine bark or more perlite to a traditional potting soil, like miracle grow, can yield great results (usually the only thing they lack is proper drainage).

Yeah, pretty danged busy for the short term. When the election is over, my next weekend will be spent on the road in New Orleans (it's an Ingress thing), so I really hope I can somehow get to the re-potting this weekend. (Maybe while I'm working on mum's computer, I can talk her into re-potting my plants. I can easily drive them down with me.) I may take OKgrowin's advice in the short term, and do a sort of 'poor man's' 5-1-1 for now. :)

Great advice from mecdave on the MG Potting Mix as a decent intermediate step. In fact, for most uses it's a reasonable final step. It varies from region to region and I forget where you are. Please put zone or location in your profile when you get a spare minute.

Dennis

Oops. Thought I had. Maybe it was just putting it in a post. I'm kind of absent-minded sometimes.

As Kgrowing pointed out, 5-1-1 mix starts with almost zero nutrients. Then you add some time release to it and later on fertilize with water solubles. The advantage and purpose of 5-1-1 is to provide good drainage and just enough moisture retention. and basically pine bark is at the core of 5-1-1 mix. That is pretty much it. By adding pine bark fine in good proportion (with some perlite) to ANY soil one can achieve that objective, be it in pot or in ground. This past season I dumped bags of pine bark into the beds and worked it in along with other amendments.

Thought I had posted this. Apparently, I never hit that last button.

Bought perlite today, and hope to make a reasonable version of 5-1-1 this weekend, if I can;t get to it before. Eyed the huge bag of pine bark mini nuggets at Lowe's today, but due to the impressive opaqueness of the bag, I couldn't tell how mini said nuggets really are. (Everything else they had was presumably larger mulch.)

Thanks very much for all the advice! As a total noob who got into this by accident, It's been quite a bit of fun going through the learning process!

This post was edited by uncleflip on Wed, Oct 29, 14 at 18:34

Mini Nuggets, should be ok. if , say, 15% is bigger than 1/2", that will be fine.
I buy the same stuff from Lowes. Then they also carry someting called "Pine Bark Mulch", which is crushed. So by mixing the two of them I get a perfect mix that I won't even need peat moss.

Today I might visit Lowes to check out. I need some to refresh what will come out of the pots soon.

here is a picture of the pine bark bags, taken @ Lowes last year

yeah just rip the bag a little with your finger and check it out. =D

Update from the accidental inadequate pepper grower, on making a 5-1-1 (ish) mix:

went to Lowe's today, and got a bag of pine bark mini nuggets (plus some egg rock to put in the bottom of the pots to improve drainage). Got home, and realized I did not have a half-inch screen. Spent 20 painstaking minutes picking out larger bits, and bits of wood, which were often the same thing. My perlite was the much smaller kind (almost gravel size), but it went in anyway. In the end, my container for mixing mandated more like a 3-1-1 mix. This can be fixed if people feel strongly I should go for more bark. If this happens, I will also get a piece of screen to ease the process of weeding out (like my pun?) the bark. Also, i had no lime. Not sure that is absolutely essential.

I want to get re-potting asap, as some of the plants have lost nearly all their leaves, and I want to get them off that old, dense soil. (Being in the working world is not helping. Tomorrow morning at the earliest.)

SO.....

More questions for my pepper-growing elders:

Do you think something closer to a true 5-1-1 would be better than my 3-1-1-ish?

Aslo, how essential is it to get out bark chunks larger than 1/2 inch- and also bits of wood? It was a real pain in the.......back (in more ways than one), and I would like to simplify if I can. I really did get a lot out.)

As always, thanks for your advice! You have all helped me immensely!

> "egg rock to put in the bottom of the pots to improve drainage"

According to Al, rocks or other large items in the bottom of the pot do not help drainage. They instead make any PWT (Perched Water Table or in my words "sponge effect") sit higher in the pot. The bottom of the PWT is the bottom of the medium. Elevate the medium and the PWT goes with it, leaving that much less unsaturated dirt for the roots to roam around in.

5:1:1 is a suggested ratio. I tend to go more dirt-heavy. 3:1:1 is probably good enough, but that's a lot of perlite in the total. Nothing wrong with that except that perlite is kinda expensive.

Don't forget the Osmocote, unless you're using for dirt something like MG Potting Mix that already has time-release ferts.

I don't worry much about larger pieces in the mix. You do want to get the hardwood out. There's no easy way to do that, though.

Dennis

Gotcha. I had been told since I was a kid to place rock or broken up bits of flower pot- or something of that ilk- in the bottom of the pot. I guess I was just going with that. If nothing else, I can place some smaller pieces of rock around the pots' drain holes, so they don't get blocked by a bit of bark or something like that.

It doesn't look like a ton of perlite. No biggie. The bag I bought was $4.24. Less than the typical pint of local brew I have at the pub Tuesday nights :)

I do have Osmocote, and need to read the label a bit before use so I don't over-do it. I also have fish emulsion (on the advice of a rather good gardener I ran across recently in NC) and another liquid plant food. (I tend to be able to feed the peppers better than I feed myself.)

The hardwood left in is wispy little shreds about the size of a toothpick. I got out all the more substantial chunks i could find. What kind of problems can the wood cause?

Thanks very much for enlightening me. The learning process continues! Hopefully soon I won;t be making nearly as many noobie mistakes as I did get up to this point. :)

When wood decays it locks up the free nitrogen in the soil. Fir bark has lignin (or something like that), an enzyme that keeps it from decaying.

Dennis

Gotcha. I would hope the small amounts in there won't cause too much trouble. While there isn't a lot of it, it's so evenly distributed that picking it all out will be a HUGE pain.