Good evening all. First time posting in here and growing my first pepper plant. I'm growing a yellow Scotch Bonnet pepper plant from seed. It is about 4 months old and WAS growing beautifully. Then I went out of town and forgot to tell my mom to water it....I came home to 2 plants with barely any leaves left, I'm talking 4 or 5 leaves left....So I watered them and the slowly began making leaves. I transplanted one from the 1 gallon to a 5 gallon fabric pot. The other stayed in a 1 gallon, as it was going to my mother. Well when the got to a point where they were back to full but with small leaves, I took my mom her plant. While drive noticed that it had produced about 8 peppers I get home and check mine and not a single pepper. That was about a week ago. Theres a ton of flower sites but no peppers. I just found out about pollinating them yesterday so I'm hoping that is the solution. So finally to the main reason I'm posting, why are the leaves that have grown stopped growing? They are all around the size of a dollar coin.
Someone may have a different explanation, but since hot peppers are pretty resilient and forgiving about pot size, I think that when you gave one the 5 gal pot, it happily settled down to expanding roots and growing more leaves, drawing on the fertilizer in the additional spotting mix, but the one that stayed in the smaller container, seeing there was no more room to grow bigger, proceeded to fulfill its biological imperative by making fruits (and seeds).
Both plants appear to have plenty of flowerbuds, so at this point it’s just a matter of blooming and setting fruits. Have they suffered from too cool or too hot temps that may have prevented them from setting fruits? Too much humidity can be a problems, too.
If these were indoors in still air, it’s possible that they didn’t get enough movement to shake the pollen loose and pollinate, but you have a fan there (unless that’s new?).
Indoors, the color range of the light needs to accomodate fruiting plants. Maybe yours it too far in the blue range?
In fabric pots, I think they tend to dry out too much as well as constantly get air-pruned roots — I think they should sit in shallow trays of water — they may not have been getting enough water for them to grow full-sized leaves… but some hot peppers are smaller plants and will not grow leaves as big as bell and other peppers.
That explanation makes total sense to me! Thank you very much for taking the time. My temps are pretty steady, 84~ day 76~night. I did have the humidity at 70% cause it was sharing a tent with some seedlings, but they are in a dome now. I'm going to keep my fingers cross, she looks healthy imo. My buddy I gave 2 plants to just told me he has about 30 pepper growing, he moved his outside a month ago.
