One was a Peppadew in a windowbox and the other was a jalapeño in a 3 gal container. I think they did miss a watering and the soil got very dry. There WAS a heavy rain recently too.
All I know is that they seemed fine the last time I looked at them, then all of a sudden all the leaves had wilted except for the youngest branch (also with fruit) and then that one wilted as well over the next couple of days.
Another one in the ground did the same thing, but this one might be different scenario:
As you know. I have been overwintering many of my pepper plants. So I do have C. annuum species that are more than a year old.
The plant grown from seeds I got in trade and was labeled Etkezi Paprika (Looking on-line I could only find references to Etkezesi Paprika and that could simply mean Hungarian Pepper) is in it's 2nd year, and it fruited tiny little fruits twice over the winter. It shot up in growth this year in the ground and cropped pretty heavily, then when the very last fruit blushed, the entire plant wilted.
The jalapeño and Peppadew above were first year plants intended to replace the older ones and the fruits were still green and hard (well the jalapeño had a couple of red fruits but was loaded with still tiny 1/2"-1" greenies.
Any thoughts on what happened? Usually peppers in my garden produce until frost and die, or I harvest the mature fruits and dig them up with minimal rootball, keep them in the garage to harvest the green ones as they ripen, and then prune down to sticks to overwinter. Occasionally the uprooted plants wilt and die when the garage temp hits freezing mark or due to neglect, but I figure that's normal and prune and see if they make it. Some of the potted hots loaded with fruits matured the fruits indoors but didn't make it over the winter (Trinidad Perfume off type, de Arbol) but I thought that was just from winter indoor stress.
So I don't know what to make of these that wilted. Would any of them recover if I prune them down to sticks? First frost is a month away. If they are not in good health, I don't think they will make it over the winter, but if all they need is a rest period, then being in the slowly cooling garage until deep freeze (around December when the unheated garage temp can start dropping below mid-20's) might be sufficient.
