Welcome tech! I was in your shoes last year, I got great advice and encouragement on this forum. You sound like you are doing a good job with your garden. No need to panic, gardening is an ongoing experiment!

I planted my peppers in the ground, but between taller tomatos and beans, so that they would get some relief from the heat. Last year they really started to produce when the cooler weather came in the fall. Its all trial and error for me.

I know the experienced gardeners will offer some great advice shortly. I just wanted to say hi and happy growing!

Tech53 you mentioned Habs and bell peppers. If had shade in the mid afternoon on it wouldn't hurt in my opinion. I usually don't grow Habs and grow 10-15 bells every year. My favorite pepper in the NM Chile type and jalapenos. I have 30 plus of the NM chile type. And they love heat. I just finished planting this weekend as they love warm hot soil and the hot sun don't bother them like it does the bells. The bells will normally shut down production during the heat but many of the chile varieties keep right on trucking. Them and okra love the heat. The chiles also produce better in low humidity. Bells will tend to produce better with higher humidity levels. Dawn should be along and she is a hab grower. Like I said I grow 1-2 plants once in a while but don't really pay any attention to how they produce as they aren't a favorite. I feel the afternoon shade would hurt them at all on the real hot days. But then again none of my peppers ever get any shade. I plant them in the open part of the garden. When I say open I mean no trees to block the wind either. So mine are grown like the growers in NM grow theirs. The other issue is I've never grown in buckets. And in small containers you might get more heat build up in your soil than I see where mine are in ground and mulched. Jay

thanks so much. well I've quite a few cayenne that I just haphazardly planted in the ground, more or less as a way to dispose of extra seed and get rid of grass in one fell swoop. I'm hoping they grow though. Any more suggestions are still very much needed. I removed a bell pepper from it's small tupperware today and found it to be nothing but a ball of roots - so there is the answer to the mystery of why they dried up so quick. I was watering a ball of roots. I'm really trying for the hot hot hot kind this year, though sadly the only fatali that came up, which is the pepper I wanted the most, died. I'm starting lots of others...somewhere I planted scotch bonnett, though I forgot where, lol...guess I'll just have to watch the un marked flats and containers. I've got several balloon peppers, bishops cap, a cubanelle or two came up, tons of serrano peppers, a few cow horns, only one thai hot so far, a brazilian starfish, 4 jalapenos from flats at the grocery store are blooming, and my bell peppers, plus quite a few more seeds that are starting, including the butch t trinidad scorpion. I really hope the butch t works out for me, I'm planning on using it to infuse vodka.

Relax. Panic doesn't solve anything.

Habs should be fine in 4 or 5 gallon pots. I've grown them in 2 gallon pots. The key is to plant them in a well-draining soil-less growing medium and give them adequate water. If the pots are a dark color, they will absorb heat which could be hard on the plant roots. Setting up something to shade the pots themselves from the sun (I use bales of hay, but anything that would block the sun would be good) will help keep the roots cooler. Habaneros, except for the fairly newish hybrid 'Chichen Itza', are fairly late to start producing, but once they start producing, they produce loads of peppers.

Peppers grow fine in full sun, but they also grow well and produce in as little as about 6 hours of direct sun here in our intense summer heat and sunlight, so don't be afraid to put them someplace where they will be shaded from the worst heat of the day. I move my peppers around every year and sometimes I just use taller okra or tomato plants to partially shade them, but this year I planted some of them in a raised bed that will get shade from a very large pecan tree beginning at about 2 p.m., and others were planted on the north side of a bean trellis and on the north side of a row of tomato plants so that the pole bean plants and tomato plants will give them some relief from the sun for part of the day.

In the absolute worst summer weather, like we had in August of last year, I rig shade cloth over the plants to shade them. It may not be necessary, but I think they produce better if you can relieve some of the heat stress in the hottest part of the summer.

Remember that with plants in pots, the constant watering will leach nutrients at the soil, so feed them regularly with a water soluable fertilizer to compensate for that.

In order to get the best production, you need to buy a good, soil-less growing medium and pot up the poor things into larger containers, or find a way to put them into the ground, or something. Pepper plants will produce peppers even while the plants are in 4" pots, but they won't produce large peppers and they won't produce many of them. If you want good production, pot up the plants to give them a chance to thrive.

Moving the plants from sun to shade won't shock them, but if you keep them in the shade too long, moving them back into full sun will be hard on them, so don't keep them in full shade for too long.

Bell peppers slow down in the heat, but usually hot peppers don't, unless it is extreme heat.

One thing you should know is that hot peppers raised in extreme heat often develop hotter flavor than that same variety will develop in cooler weather. So, be careful when biting into a hot pepper variety that you always have eaten without trouble before, because if it is raised in excessively hot temps, it will be hotter than it was in milder years.

If I had planted a lot of peppers and had lost track of what they were, I'd try to pot up at least one of each group into a container so I could feel assured of giving to try each type. If you look at your peppers carefully, you'll see some difference in leaf shape between various kinds of peppers. Habanero leaves are distinct from most other pepper leaves for example. Learning to distinguish between them visually will help you in future years to some extent. As your plants begin producing peppers, you should be able to figure out more or less which ones or which by the shape and size of the maturing fruit.

I stake all my peppers to wooden stakes hammered into the ground at planting time. Each stake is labeled with the name of that plant. The purpose of the stake is to hold the plant upright because, often, plants holding a full load of fruit will lean over, fall over or break. The stakes help prevent that. With some of the larger peppers, I use those little ringed cages that stores sell for tomatoes, but which are not large enough for most indeterminate tomato plants.

Dawn

well i can't afford all that soil, and really probably cant afford specialized growing medium, so that's a no go. What I can do though is start re planting. I'm thinking of mulching more out door areas, get a bail of hay or something and throw in a bit of sandy soil with the clay and some mulch - apparently the city of norman gives away free mulch, so maybe I can make a run down there.

thank you dawn, no offense taken at all! I have enjoyed all the help everyone is giving. I am taking it as often as possible. I'm going to be transplanting much of my garden to the ammended ground soon. How often should I water a decent (4-6 inches or taller) plant in amended clay, and also unamended clay (that's what I started the non potted part in) if I'm using a soaker hose?

Tech,

Out of pure curiosity- are you a Texas Tech fan by chance? :)

tech53,

One of the hardest things to learn about watering is that you cannot do it by formula or by schedule. Everyone's soil is differently in the way that it absorbs water, holds water, etc. and everyone's soil dries out at different rates. Thus, your question about watering is hard to answer.

What you'll need to do is to water with the soaker hose for a specific period of time. Let's say 30 minutes. Then, check the soil where you've been watering. Take a trowel and dig down into it and see how deeply down the moisture goes. That will give you an idea how long to water. You want to put moisture in the root zone, and slightly below the root zone because that will encourage the roots to go a little deeper.

Now, here's the complicated thing about unamended clay versus amended clay. First, I hope they are on a separate soaker hose or that you water the unamended area separately from the amended area because, as your question implies, they may absorb moisture at different rates. The problem with unamended clay, if it is heavy dense clay, is that it bakes as hard as concrete and once it is that dry, the water runs off of it pretty quickly. Watch how your soaker hose waters and see how long it takes before the water begins to either pond and puddle on the soil surface near the pepper plants, or if your land slopes, you may just start seeing it run downhill on the surface of the soil instead of being absorbed. When you have dense, unamended clay and the water keeps running off, the only way around that in the current year is to water until the water is either running off or ponding/puddling, and then as soon as you notice the water is not being absorbed, turn off the soaker hose for a while. This will allow whatever moisture has penetrated the soil to be absorbed a little more deeply. Wait 30 minutes to an hour and turn the soaker hose back on. Again, keep an eye on it and turn off the hose when the water starts to pond, puddle or run off. This prevents you from wasting water and money.

In amended clay, the process is the same but, because of the amendments added to the clay, you hopefully will see less ponding and puddling and less water running off.

It isn't just the soil either. A lot depends on the plants. Peppers like to stay moist, but not soggy, so they might need a good deep watering twice a week in hot weather when rain is not falling. Okra and southern peas, on the other hand, tolerate a lot of heat and dry soil, so they might only need a deep watering once every couple of weeks in that same hot, dry weather. I know it will be frustrating to hear me say this, but the only way to learn what your plants require in your soil with your conditions is through trial and error. That's true for all of us. I wish it was as easy as saying you can put your soaker hoses on a timer and water for 45 minutes each day on two days a week, but life, gardening and watering is a lot more complicated than that. So, just keep an eye on your plants. As long as their color is good, and they are growing and setting fruit, and the fruit is enlarging, then they're getting enough moisture. If the plants stall, if the flowers abort without forming fruit, if the fruit gets blossom end rot or if the plants wilt, then you'll have to evaluate the ongoing conditions and figure out what's causing the problem and how to fix it.

Although I've been gardening for quite a long time now, I still learn something new every day and that is normal. My soil behaves completely different in June than it does in March, and it behaves differently in a dry June than in a wet June, etc. So, none of us every really has it all figured out---we just observe what is going on, compare it to what we think should be going on, and then make whatever adjustments we need to make to get our garden from where it is to where we want it to be. A garden is just a big old experiment with a million variables.

Dawn