Ants farm aphids which can disease your plants.
Get rid of the ants.
I used Woodstream and Terro brand liquid ant killer.
Terro brand worked lots better.
You put the liquid in a bottle cap and the ants take it to the hive.
So far I haven't had ants anywhere for almost 2 years.
I had a bad ant problem inside and out.
You'll find the ants will dissapear for a while but come back.I think the eggs hatch.
The second wave will be lots smaller.
The stuff is borox and some kind of sugar syrup.
Ants will take aphids underground and attatch them to roots and harvest the sugar from the aphids.

That could be your problem.
Could have grubs in your soil too.
Look for thumb size dents in the soil.Dig about 2 or 3 inches where you see the round mini crater.There should be a grub there.
Grubs come up at night to feed or whatever.
This years been really bad for getting June bug (the metalic blue/green beatles).
I killed over 60 in 1 15 gal. container a few weeks ago.
My Trinidads kept loosing their leaves suddenly.
Every day I'd dig up 6+grubs so I used an electric worm zapper and thats when a massive amoount of grubs came up.
Got on my stomping boots and killed them all-I hope.
Gonna do it again to make sure I got them.
I live by Van Nuys in the valley,not that far from Culver City so our weather is probably close to the same.
My plants think it's early spring right now.Warm days cool nights.

Smokemaster, your grub info is very interesting. Tell us about the "electric worm zapper." I don't know about them. Seems like a relative used something when I was a kid to help collect worms when he wanted to fish....but I thought it was something unique to him and his inventive mind. Hadn't thought about that in years and never considered it would work for insect larva in the ground.

Mine was made out of an etension cord that was split in two.Each wire was soldered to 2 separate copper welding rods about 3 ft. long.
Stick them in the ground about 6 ft apart as deep as you can push them in and plug it in and when worms start comming up turn it off and collect the worms.
I stuck them across from each other in my 15 gal. pot to see if the grubs came up.They did.
I'm thinking of connecting all my pots together with coat hangers where each end is in a different pot-hook them together like christmas lights-in parralell so I only have to zap them all at once not 1 x 1.
I think when I was a kid the popular mechanics mag. had an add in it to either buy plans for making one or to buy one.
I've read about versions that are supposed to hook to your cars coil too.
Damp soil is OK but wet soil conducts too good and could blow a fuse.Somewhere i read to put a shop light with a switched plug between the power source and your zapper rods so you don't get a solid short when you plug it in.Your just using the ground/pots whatever to complete the cuircut...a giant resistor.
You can drill holes the long way in some pieces of broomstick for handles.
I don't know if it killed stuff if you left it on longer than we used to.We wanted live nightcrawlers so we only left it plugged in until worms came up.

Don't forget to be careful and unplug it before messing with whatever comes up or you'll zap yourself.

Wow, I've got to make one of those bug zappers. An old Japanese gardener looked at my Tazmanian habanero and said, 'Bugs', and said they are coming out at night, and told me it wad dead and to pull it up. Really a shame as it was about four feet high. Does the bug zapper kill the ants too? I hate ants. I also realize that sounds sort of bad, but I really can't stand them. I'll get some of that Terro stuff as well.

So would the worm zapper be considered an organic control for Japanese beetle grubs...? :) Haven't seen that in any of my organic gardening books!

Sorry to hear your plants didn't make it culverpepperhead, but we did get to learn about an interesting garden tool. It may go on my Christmas list and directions forwarded to an inventive friend.

I've only used it once for grubs so far.
I didn't want to soak any pots with poison and I know when it comes to bugs,if you see 10 there are 100 you don't see.
it was a last resort...
I think it got them all because the plant is trying to grow new leaves and buds.
The only way I could really tell if I got them all would be to dig up the plant and see if there are any grubs in the soil.Which I won't be doing.
I don't know if it kills any bugs but it sure makes them not want to be in the soil anymore as long as the cord is plugged in.
Someone told me that you used to be able to buy worm zappers but somebody sued someone or the product was considered unsafe so they were told to stop making and selling them by the feds or whoever keeps tabs on such things.

When the grubs were in that pot I'd see the plant leaning over every once in a while.When I'd check it out I'd see where the grub came up and dig one up.On that side of the plant there would be no roots at all left.I'm sure the grub was probably chowing downfor a while before it did enough damage to be noticable by me.
Now I have cricket problems.They eat the outside layer off the stems of my plants until they die.
With small plants it looks like a miniture beaver was eating my plants.They ate enough sten to make the plant fall over then they ate the leaves.
They especially like Manzanos for some reason.
A lot of my plants are scared all the way up the trunks where the crickets have eaten off the outer layer of the stems.
I tried cricket bait but they eat that for desert.

The bugs in my garden are real happy.
I give them regular showers with insect soap so they are nice and clean.
Then I powder their little behinds with DE or boric acid powder so they don't chafe.
I shine up their shells with neem oil so they look nice and shiney so they can attract a mate and make a bunch of babies that also eat up my pepper plants...

Now I'm also giving them electroshock therapy to solve all their mental problems which might interfere with their ability to eat and reproduce as much as the can.

A happy bug is a hungry bug that is just about to munched all my pepper plants down to bare stems.

Where can I get Tasmanian hab seeds? I've got quite a collection of seeds for the spring, mostly different habs and a couple of scotch bonnets. I don't have these.

Put it on the seed exchange or buy from the link below.
Mine doesn't have pods on it yet...
Might have some latter,budding right now.

Here is a link that might be useful: tazmanian hab seeds

Thanks!