Pepper Plant Pests

[MudinyourEye]

Hi --- this may be an old topic but I think I need to try anyway.

My hot pepper and bell peper plants are getting eaten down to nothing but nothing else in my garden is. My tomato plants, cucumbers, strawberries, squash and watermelon are untouched but the pepper plants are nothing but sticks in the ground now. This occurred over a one week time period....last Sunday they were healthy.

I'm going to check at the local Agway and was going to try sevin dust around the plants to see if that makes a difference. I've grown pepers in this same garden for six years and this is the first time I've had a pest destroy my plants like this so I'm at a loss what is going on here.

Thanks///Mud

[hendi_alex]

Maybe snails? This has been a very wet season here in S.C. and the snails have been so very active. They have not bothered my pepper plants much, but most of the greens have anything from holes in the leaves, to having entire leaves munched away.

[MudinyourEye]

Thanks for the reply. Any ideas on how to get rid of them?

I'm not reluctant to using sevin dust since its so early in the growing season. I'm a month away from having fruit on the plants and all the flowers are gone now anyway.

[hendi_alex]

If it is in fact snails, then regular insect poisons don't work. There are several snail threads on this board. But if I were you, would scout around the garden area, looking under crawl spaces of things, looking for slugs. I just started hand gathering my slugs from their hiding places. Will limit activity to that and perhaps a couple of beer traps for now. I collected over 100 slugs yesterday. There are various snail baits but don't know compatible they are with a garden area. Bell pepper will do just great in 3 gallon containers, that would allow you to move them to different locations to perhaps avoid the problem. But at this point, your issue could be most anything from rabbit, to deer, to whatever. I don't know what critters tend to decimate a pepper plant, but do know that they can be a target of snails, so tossed that out just as a possibility.

Try to get a handle on what is actually causing the damage before getting to involved into what to do about it. In the mean time, I would consider buying some replacements and at least temporarily letting them grow in containers that could be moved around. Bell peppers will grow very quickly in one gallon nursery pots. If you chose to leave them in containers, then as mentioned above, you will want to step them up to a true three gallon size.