I have two plants ( out of about 140) that have yet to flower this year. Not dropped blossoms-never had blossoms. One of them is an over wintered chiltepin that flowered last year. I have no idea what is causing this. Both plants were moved to different spots with no change.

john

Too much nitrogen fert? I rather doubt Dan would do this. Just a WAG. Not enough light? I have light problems in my heavily shaded container garden & amt of direct sun can make a big difference in some varieties.

I thought maybe light too, John, and moved both plants to full sun but it didn't help.

to both john's i have them in the graden about 10 hours or more of full sun so that is out .all 138 plants in same area . it is a mind bog they are some great looking plants too, but not one flower on any of the 5
dan

LET IT BURN

how big is the pot they are in? maybe its not big enough. i had a bell pepper in a pot flowered and set fruit then nothing at all. planted it in an empty spot in the garden in 3-4 days was flowering again.

Maybe the active growing roots are too close to the outside of the pot. the soil can get very hot there and can cook the roots. I like to grow my peppers a little root bound in small pots and then put into bigger pots. This allows the root system to fill the pot itself better.

Some nurseries use a chemical on the inside of the pots to kill the roots when they reach the outside of the pots. They claim the plant grows much better that way and the pot fills up with roots. they can not grow in circles around the pot.

I can only guess it must work well or people would not be doing that.

This might explain why John's plant flowered last year but not this year. the plant last year might have had the roots more inside the pot because of transplanting up from smaller pots and this year might have them more on the outside edge of the pot.

Of course I am only making guesses and speculating. I do not know the real cause of this strange problem.

The solution might be to get some of that chemical to spray the inside of a few pots and see if it improves results.

here is an abstract on chemical root pruning.

Abstract

The objective of this study was to determine the influence of chemical root pruning on the nursery growth of (1 + 0) Pinus halepensis seedlings and assess their outplanting performance. The experiment was conducted in an open-air nursery and the seedlings were grown in Quick-pots coated with 0, 0.0083 and 0.033 kg/l CuCO3·Cu(OH)2. At the end of the nursery growth period, seedling above-ground and below-ground morphological characteristics and nutritional status were assessed. Following, the seedlings were planted in the field and survival and growth were recorded for two growing seasons after planting. The most significant effect of chemical root pruning was on seedling morphology. Increased copper concentration on the container walls led to seedlings with significantly greater height, diameter, shoot and root biomass and quality index. However, there were no differences among treatments for field survival which was high, in all treatments, 2 years after planting. Seedlings field height was not affected by copper treatment, in contrast to the diameter and stem volume which were significantly greater in the seedlings subjected to higher copper concentration treatment.

Keywords: Chemical root pruning; Pinus halepensis; Root morphology; Seedling growth; Survival

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Apparently you can make your own spray by putting a little Copper Carbonate into some latex paint. then paint the inside of the pot.

Here is a link that might be useful: chemical root pruning

We had two St.Lucia last year that did not bloom at all. One was in the raised bed with 20 other pepper plants loaded with peppers. The other was in a 5 gallon black nursery pot in a row with 30 other loaded pepper plants.
The plants got the same amount of nutrients, water, sun, heat etc that all the other peppers got. Never figures out why they never bloomed, but we brought the one in the pot inside and overwintered it and this year we have picked 10-20 pods off of it.

kendra

pay no mind to the frist post on this page i must have hit wrong key. any how thank you all for your input. i will just add it to the mystery of growing chile,s
dan

LET IT BURN

Whew

thought maybe you had OD'D on peppers