Green peppers stopped growing

[erinduke]

Hi, I have a few beautiful green peppers that started growing. They grew to about 1/2 size of what they should be and just stopped. They still look very healthy and don't look like they're lacking nutrients at all. Does anyone know why that happened? They haven't grown in size for 3 or 4 weeks now.

[rainbowgardener]

What's the weather like? I have green pepper plants just sitting there doing hardly anything. I think it is the combination of very wet weather all season so far, too much water and not enough sunshine, and the fact that the patio where they are planted has gotten very shady as the trees around it got bigger, so even more not enough sun...

[erinduke]

Very very hot. I'm in Florida. Theres a drought but I've made sure they get plenty of water. Do you think the heat could just be stunting them?

[stella1751]

If you are talking the pepper fruit, they are settling in to their wall-thickening and flavorization stage. They will not get any bigger. It happens. On occasion, peppers will grow a first small harvest and then stop. If you pick those, they should go into their real production stage.

If you are talking about the plants, well, they should continue to grow all year long. Try giving them some compost tea. They love compost tea! If you don't have that, then a mix of fish fertilzer and seaweed solution should perk them up.

[erinduke]

Thanks Stella. It is their first harvest. The plant is growing tall and budding still, and new leaves are popping up. The peppers have just stopped growing in size. So if I pick the two that I have then the plant should start producing?

[stella1751]

Here's what Shepherd Ogden has to say about peppers in his book Step by Step Organic Vegetable Gardening:

• Pepper plants may also set a few fruit during the good weather in early summer, then apparently forget what they are supposed to be doing; if you wait for the first few to ripen fully, it may be too late for a second set to ripen fully where seasons are short. To be practical about it, I'd recommend taking half your plants and pinching out the first setting of fruit once they are the size of a marble; they will flower with renewed vigor and give you a bumper crop late in the season. The other half of the plants can be allowed to set a few fruit early and mature them for the first harvest.

It sounds to me like this is what your plant is doing. When I grew Poblanos, I thought they would never produce. A few of them did just what yours is doing: they gave me a few small peppers that sat there and did nothing for, like, forever. When the other plants started to produce, about two or three weeks later, I did get a bumper crop from them. However, the early producers never did come on strong for me. I think if I had sacrificed those first fruits, the early producers would have done as well as the others.

The reason the fruits are so small could be that the plant was still young when it began producing them. This may sound dumb, but the younger a woman is, the more likely she is to produce a smaller than average baby If that's the case, then your next fruit set on your mature plant could be regular sized.

Look at nutrition, too, though