Peppers can have thin walls for many reasons:

1 Some bell pepper varieties naturally have thinner walls than others; 2) You are harvesting them too early. With green bells, the walls of most varieties start out thinner and get thicker as time goes on. It is possible you are harvesting them too early before they have a chance to develop thicker walls; 3) It could be your soil pH is either too high or too low and the peppers are unable to take up all the nutrients they need; 4) It could be uneven moisture in the soil; 5) It could be a nutritional deficiency. Peppers are heavy feeders and do best when fed early and often. You don't want to use too much nitrogen, but something like a 5-10-10 at planting time and then after the first peppers form would be helfpful to the plants. I feed peppers with Tomato-Tone and they do just fine. In particular, a lack of calcium and potassium (and it is more likely calcium than potassium) can contribute to thin walls. It is not necessarily that your soil is deficicent in potassium or calcium, but rather that the plant is taking up the nutrients properly. And, finally, 6) It could be because bell peppers don't like summer so often just creep along and produce poor peppers (often small, thin-walled or misshapen) until we get later in summer and the nights start getting longer and cooler.

Thanks, I was sad last night. I BOUGHT red and yellow peppers for fajitas, but I thought, I have green peppers growing. The hybrid Revolution was not bad, but the Burans were mostly worthless. They are in one of the new beds and just sitting there thumbing there little pepper noses at me. Fertilizing is on my list for this week. Wish I'd done it before the rain.

I know how that feels. I often have to buy green bells (in bulk, of course, at CostCo) to make salsa because the tomato plants are producing heavily long, long before the bell peppers are ready. The alternative is to run all the tomatoes through the tomato mill, freeze them, and wait for the bell peppers to catch up, and I don't like doing that because having those frozen tomatoes waiting to be made into salsa is stressful. I just keep thinking that "I have to make the salsa, I have to make the salsa". It hangs there in my head as if I am deliberately procrastinating instead of just holding tomatoes in the freezer until the bell peppers catch up. I'd rather just buy the bells and make the salsa before the heat cranks up from incredibly hot in June/early July to insanely hot later in July and August. I can get tomatoes, onions and jalapeno peppers all to mature together at the right time for salsa-making, but the bell peppers are a day late (more like 6 to 8 weeks late) and a dollar short. I just use them fresh later on and freeze a lot of them chopped for cooking and sliced for fajitas and pepper steak. Cilantro can't stay happy late enough in the year for salsa-making either, having already flowered and gone to seed before tomatoes are present in large enough quanitites for salsa.

Cilantro really frustrates my husband. LOL. Joke for the day, I thought "Time to make the donuts" when I read "I have to make the salsa".

I've never been able to grow cilantro. Ever. Well, except in the house and I think our house is too hot for it. Even in the early spring. I love it and it hates me.

Amy, That is just too funny! Sometimes I do have that image in my mind as I'm trudging off to the kitchen for a few hot, steamy hours of canning.

Hazel, Throw cilantro seeds onto your compost pile sometime in winter. It is sort of like natural winter sowing but without having them in milk jugs or something. Forget about them. One day while you're pulling weeds and tossing them on the compost pile in late winter or early spring, you'll discover cilantro plants everywhere and will be really happy to see them. Mine have self-sown and grown on.around my compost pile for years. I always harvest about 80% of them and leave about 20% to set seed for the following year.

Rebecca, I agree. I just work with the fresh ingredients that I can grow and do have when the tomatoes are ripe and buy the rest. For this year, I've already canned 175 jars of Annie's Salsa and am making the last few batches this week. It sounds like a lot, but we've already given away about 18 or 20 jars to friends who were dying to have some Annie's Salsa so the huge stockpile of salsa can melt away very quickly some years.

I always have to hide some of the salsa away in a secret, undisclosed location or Tim would give all of it away. He's a sucker for any friend who says "Man, it has been months since I've had any Annie's Salsa and Christmas still is months away". I like sharing our salsa with friends, but I'm not willing to give away so much that we don't have enough for the rest of the year. I keep telling him he needs to start giving them the recipe when they say they're hungry for Annie's Salsa so they can make their own. I am so sick of making and canning salsa that I don't even want to eat any of it right now, but I'll get over that as soon as the canning is done. It is just that I've made so much over the last month that I am about at the point that I can't stand the sight of it right now.

We now have Sterilite and Rubbermaid storage totes filled with jars of salsa and pickles in every extra square foot of space in every closet, etc. in the house, and plastic underbed storage boxes are harboring home-canned goods as well. The pantry can only hold so much and all the extra canned goods have to go somewhere or, in this case, everywhere.

Dawn

I can come down there and take some of that problem off your hands. lolz

We're about out of yer zesty sweet pickles. Boys have grown fond of them and a substitute won't quite be the same, especially in mixes like tuna salad. They stand out perfectly.

Oh Bon, I wish y'all lived right next door so I could pass jars of pickles to you right over the fence. We simply live too far apart. Those Zesty B&B Pickles are pretty addictive.

I love those pickles also and I made a lot of them last year, but I haven't had many cukes this year. I am picking a lot of tomatoes, but a lot of my garden is starting to die. Al said he ran into an attorney today, that always talks to us about gardening, and he said his was dying also. We just got too much rain all at once. We went from beautiful plants to dead ones after too much rain. Even okra plants and bean plants look really bad. My Korean squash is just now blooming and it still looks healthy, the cucumbers look OK, but aren't producing as much as normal. The pepper plants still look good and have a lot of blooms, but I haven't picked many peppers yet. It has indeed been a strange year. I guess I will put in a few new things when I can.

I just planted some more cukes, squash, corn, beans, MOOR okra, carrots and the slew of cole crops and more. We had that thunderstorm last night and it's just perfect. Hopefully, I'll have tomatoes coming out of my ears this year.

My garden has been backwards this year. Too hot too early, then too cool in May/earliest June. Too dry most of the time, except when a ton of rain falls in one day and it is too wet for a few days before becoming too dry again in the blink of an eye. I am amazed we have had such great production so far. It defies logic. If the whole garden were to die tomorrow, I couldn't complain. The problem is that nothing will die, so I am having to rip out living, producing plants that look like crap in order to make room for the fall garden. Usually stuff cooperates with me and just dies in this sort of heat. Why is it that the plants you want to live forever (like Rhubarb) will look at you, whimper and die, while the ones you want to die will look at you, shake their head and live on, even if they look like death would be an improvement? This has got to be the oddest gardening year ever.

Then, maybe I'll have a full summer garden in September. That would be cool, except it wouldn't be cool outside and, well, that's not cool.

September will be cooler than July, guaranteed!

It was 92* in Bartlesville the day I was married, 10/2/76. And as I recall, the summer of 1980 we went over 100 every day for 58 days. Tulsa's hottest summer since 1905. But yes, it should be cooler in September. ;)

I remember 1980 very well. It was our hottest summer ever until 2011 came along. Even in 2011, though, September was cooler than July and August. When we got married on Sept. 2, 1983, it was 101, I think, and it was hot, but that's not as bad as it being that hot in October!

If September 2016 is not cooler than July and August, then we're all in trouble because I don't think we could handle another month of intense heat. June, July and August are bad enough. In our county, the heat usually breaks slightly in mid-August. It doesn't necessarily change much---maybe highs of 100-103 instead of 105-110 or higher in the worst years, but it always is a sign that fall is coming and things will be getting better.

I was 12 in the summer of 1980. That was the year my parents put in an above ground pool. Haha. There's probably a reason for that...or maybe it was coincidence. Because I was a kid, I don't remember much about the heat and all. Kids tend to not worry about those things. I do remember 2011 clearly. I remember when the AC went out. I remember that no one could play outside until 8:30 at night. We were still living in town and 8:30 is when the kids and families came out to play. And it was still too hot even then. But we tried to run the kids around a bit before bedtime. I remember when I was visiting my sister in Edmond and on the way home on I44, a short rain happened. And it had been so long since it had rained, that everyone lost their mind and forgot how to drive in the rain. I remember that my son's piano skills increased a lot that year from being stuck indoors and he became slightly addicted to video games that year. I remember that my daughter was a lifeguard at Earlywine pool and it was dangerously hot for the lifeguards.

Let's hope those type of summers only come every 31 years like the last two.

In 1980, I lived in a house with 2 window air conditioners. There was a landfill a few blocks from us that was burning under ground. When it was finally cool enough to open windows we had this horrible acrid smell in the air. And my teenaged brother in law was living with us. Oh, that was a horrible summer.

2011 is when I had my knee replaced. That was Nov. Up til then I worked on the ranch. I don't have much memory of that summer except pulling myself up the steps to the office every day. Not my favorite year either.

In 1980 I was in college and driving to work in a car with no air conditioner every afternoon (I worked from 3-11 pm and had a one-hour commute). You couldn't possibly drive to work in an unairconditioned car and work in those clothes, so I drove to work in a t-shirt and shorts and changed into my work clothing after I arrived at work. It was a horrible summer. I am sure that for my dad it was the summer of the spider mites, but we also had tomatoes for most of the summer even though he had to fight a hard battle to keep them alive.

In 2011, we were hot and dry beyond belief and I largely abandoned the garden once we were fighting wildfires day and night and night and day. Perhaps for that reason, oddly enough, my Piricicaba broccoli survived the summer at the shady west end of the garden, largely because I wasn't there to pull it out and replace it with a more heat-friendly crop. When the rain returned in late August and the number of wildfires occupying our time began dropping, I returned to my garden in the fall and found Piricicaba in full production. It produced until a hard freeze got it in December. The Seminole pumpkins also had a great year because I watered them just enough to keep them (and the butternuts and a warted ornamental pumpkin) alive and producing. We harvested dozens and dozens of winter squash and pumpkins that autumn. That was the last year we didn't have SVBs or squash bugs, though so far the same can be said about this year too.

The oddball in this year's garden is some kale growing in a large container with Swiss Chard and strawberries at the west end of the garden. There was a point where it seemed like it was going to bolt, so I cut it down to about 1" above the soil level and it regrew completely and got huge again and hasn't bolted yet. It is odd. Kale usually doesn't thrive in this heat, even in the shade. When pulling out tomato plants from the main raised bed of them yesterday, I found some surviving (but bolted and blooming) Cherokee lettuce that I couldn't even see when the plants were full and lush and very leafy.

Our peppers have been slow but are doing really well now. It remains a mixed-up, crazy and backwards garden year, but at least the garden is producing.

I was reading all of this and wondering why I didn't remember the heat of 1980. Well, now I know why. I lived in Colorado Springs until May, then moved to Alaska. LOL

Dawn - still time to start peppers from seed?

Carol, You were in a much better place than we were here. Until 2011, I thought there never would be a worse summer than 1980. It was one of those years where the roads cracked and pavement shifted because the heat and drought were too much for them. I believe it was the first time I became aware that heat stroke actually kills people. Then, along came 2011 and it finally beat 1980 in every way---higher temperatures for a longer period, the most consecutive days at 100 or more degrees, the least rain, etc., at least in Ft. Worth, and I think that all the new weather records set in Ft. Worth were set here in Love County too because our summer of 2011 mirrored theirs perfectly. I still think 1936 was hotter here in Love County, but that is based on anecdotal reports from old timers here who lived through 1936.

Rebecca, Nope. No way. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. The OSU-recommended planting date for peppers for the fall garden is July 15th, and that is from transplants. To have transplants ready now to go into the ground this week, you would have needed to start the seeds no less than 6 weeks ago and, since peppers can be pokey to germinate and grow, I would have started them no fewer than 8 weeks ago, and ideally would have started them in April or early May. New pepper transplants for fall have been available in stores around me since early June, and there still are some on garden center shelves now. I imagine they will have pepper transplants at TMD this weekend along with the tomato transplants.

Dawn

Rebecca, I wish you lived close to me. I have several peppers still sitting on the porch waiting to be planted. They could use a good home.

Darn on the pepper seeds, but now I'm debating my need for more peppers anyway. TMD will have plants, but only a couple varieties, and I'm not a huge fan of cooked bell peppers anyway (really hate any veggie cooked mushy, actually). I have two plants already, and not adding peppers will leave room for something else, when I really just eat peppers raw or crisp cooked. TMD won't have winter squash, she says, and I can't find any plants in town, and I could really use a butternut or acorn squash. Next year I'll start my own seeds, since I can do those outside.

Hazel, Hmmm. I think you're turning into a plant hoarder. What are we going to do with you? I hoard pepper plants too, and have a flat of about 30 of them sitting in the shade. They are ornamental types raised from seed that have been waiting for a home for far too long.

Every single day when I walk into the garden and look at that flat of pepper plants, I think I'll start putting them in the ground that day, and every day the harvest or canning interferes.

Today or tomorrow they might actually make it into the ground (I did plant about 6 of them last week) because I have removed a lot of tomato plants and opened up some space here and there. The problem is that I want to transplant them in the evenings when it is cooler, and by evening, the canning has sucked all the energy out of my body and the last thing I want to do is to go out to the garden and do anything.

I think this might be my last big canning week for a while. I just canned the last batch of cucumbers and I only have a few more batches of tomatoes to go. Later on there will be lots of peppers, but I've used so many hot peppers in the salsa that there's not a big pile of jalapenos, at least, waiting to be canned. There will be a lot later on, but probably not until closer to August. If I could have a canning-free week, I might actually get something done in the garden. I really need to deadhead a lot of flowers. Too many things are demanding attention, and I have to put harvesting, cooking and eating the food harvested, and canning the surplus first.

The only way for me to stop the endless tomato and cucumber harvesting-canning cycle is to pull out plants, so I have been doing that. When you plant too many, your only salvation is to get tough and remove the plants once enough canning has been done. It takes a lot of discipline for me to get tough and start removing plants. I plan to spend an hour in the garden this morning yanking out some plants whose main productive period has ended. An hour is not long, but I can get a lot done if I stay focused. I've learned that if I don't pull out those tired, old tomato plants quickly enough, they reach a point where the disease and pest issues peak and begin to decline. Then the plants start putting out new growth and recovering and preparing to set fruit for fall. Well, I don't need to have a gazillion tomatoes for fall because I'm not going to be canning them, so I need to get the plants out of the ground before they get their second wind. It is hard to remove a recovering tomato plant but much easier to remove a tired, sickly looking one. That will leave me more space for the ornamental peppers.

Dawn

I have several pepper plants that I thought were going to die. Some did, but the ones that survived, keep on going in solo cups. I have some buckets that had dwarf tomatoes in them that I could replace with peppers, though they might stay stunted. Dwarf tomatoes were kind of a bust. Maybe the buckets got too hot. Then, too, blight and spider mites have taken their toll, as well.

The more I pay attention online, the more I see people commenting that they're losing everything to blight and/or bugs. Tomatoes especially. Appearing to not be the best gardening year, that's for sure. And Amy, last week at Cherry Street I bought bell peppers that were thin walled. So it's not just you. Tasted good, though.

I grew the biggest bell peppers this year, bigger than anything I've grown before. What's hilarious about it, is that these peppers were grown from seed saved 3 years ago from a red bell pepper I bought at Reasors. These things are huge. Maybe 5 or 6 inches long and 3 or 4 inches wide. They aren't blocky. I had to pick them still green because they were pulling the plant to the ground. I haven't cut into them yet, but all the other peppers I have cut have been thin walled.

Blight and pests are a problem every year, though some years they certainly are worse than others. I have had plenty of disease-riddled, pest-infested plants this year, but probably not any more than I see in a typical year, and production has been great anyway. The key is that many such problems can be overcome with luck, skill and timing. Sometimes people just get disgusted and start yanking out plants or give up and abandon the garden when it likely will produce great in a few more weeks if they keep it going through the dog days of summer. I'm really too stubborn to do give up on the garden, unless we get to the point that the water bill is getting so high that I just have to shut down the irrigation system and let things play out however they will. Often, I am so slow to yank out diseased or pest-infested plants that they outgrow the issues that were plaguing them and return to good health on their own with no help from me and begin producing again. When that happens, I am reminded that I only tend the garden. I certainly am not in charge of it or in control of it!

Peppers can be just as much of a garden diva in summer as carrots can be. Let's face it. We are so hot here that many pepper varieties just don't produce well in the height of the summer, though they produce great before the real heat arrives and produce even better in autumn when the weather cools down. While most hot peppers produce in all kinds of heat, many sweet peppers do not. The plants make up for it in the fall, often loading themselves down with so many peppers that they break under the weight of their own fruit. Thin walls do often get thicker in fall, and I think that might be because the conditions under which they are growing are milder allowing the plants to build thicker walls on the current load of fruit since the plants aren't expending so much time just trying to survive.

Mary, One of my favorite sweet bells is Super Heavyweight. The problem with it is that the weight of the extra-large peppers often breaks the plant, so I don't grow it as often as I once did. Your pepper sounds like it produces big monsters like Super Heavyweight does. I can think of several other varieties that produce large peppers.

Dawn

My peppers are really just trying to survive right now. Lots of blossom drop. They're in the shade until it cools off...someday.

I really don't want extra large ... anything. I won't be canning peppers, though I planted some to dry. But DH wouldn't mind stuffed peppers (not my favorite). I just want peppers with thick enough walls to make strips from for frying, or even in salads. I want tomatoes I can use at one sitting for the 2 of us and won't break my heart when I see it's half eaten by some critter. I like the big ones for sauce making, though. I put a bell pepper in a space in the tomato bed yesterday. I thought it was going to die, but it seemed to be doing well in the solo cup with several peppers started. I probably shocked it and it will drop all of them.

Well, I wish I knew what this Reasor's pepper was (what variety). I'm sure it's a hybrid of some sort. I threw the rest of the seeds out when I sowed these. I figured I didn't need to keep them anymore, and I only seeded and planted them on a whim. I don't grow many bells. Just a handful. The others I have are Carnival, and they are all smallish/medium...but they are thin walled too. They seem to all mature to purple. I love jalapenos, and all hot peppers, and that is mostly what I grow.

Amy, I was over at the Owasso Reasors today, and they have those gigantic red bell peppers on sale for 88 cents. I bought several just to save the seed. I kid you not...these 2 plants that I grew out from those seeds have been so prolific and make the nicest peppers! Really nice and big, and they make a ton of them...whatever it is...it outdid any bells I've ever grown. I'm sure all the Reasors stores have them, it's just that my Claremore Reasors really stinks and their produce is generally old.

Mary

I will have to go get one! 2 years ago I started seeds from the sweet peppers (little pointed ones) I got from sprouts. They did better than anything else, but like you, I didn't save seeds other than the ones I planted.

Amy, I love Sprouts! Believe it or not, I rarely go to Owasso. I haven't been to Tulsa in almost 2 years. I just don't drive like I used to. I should have gone over there today, while I had the chance. I love their produce and their meat, and also their bulk items, and their bulk spices. I noticed that Reasors didn't have quite the produce selection that they used to have a few years back, and I wondered if Sprouts has had an impact on them. I'm sure it has.

We keep finding that sprouts produce doesn't keep very long. It was great when they first opened. I love the winter veggies, though. It's not local. At least some of Reasors is local, but it tends to cost more. We got peaches and nectarines at the produce stand that are fabulous. I never seem to get going early enough to hit the farmers market.

Funny, I love Sprouts too, but I find that their produce lasts a good length of time. That's the main place I go in winter for veggies. Their prices are great. I also love their bulk items, because I can get smaller amounts that suit one person. It's where I get my turbinado sugar, chia seed, and flax seed. I also like the chocolate peanut caramel clusters, when I'm feeling careless, lol. I also like that I can get a single bone in chicken boob, and small packs of thin sliced chicken breasts. Everyone else always seems to have nothing but giant family packs. They also have Botanical Interests seeds. And good eggs. Only bad thing is that their dairy prices are the most expensive around.

Rebecca, I agree. If I were closer, I'd shop at Sprouts for meat, produce, and bulk items. In my pantry, I keep lentils, different types of rice, beans, etc., in quart canning jars. Oh, and white and pink sea salt. Once meat (beef) started getting so high, I really cut back. I will buy chicken breasts in bulk and freeze them individually or in pairs. The few times I've been to sprouts, I didn't buy any dairy, and I stayed away from the expensive in the center isles. I pretty much just shopped the perimeter.

When we first started shopping there we did not have a problem with produce spoiling, it's only recently this has been happening. I like their lunch meat, their bulk items and spices, good bread, meat - sometimes. I occasionally venture into the cosmetic/suppliment area. I bought and fell in love with parsley root last winter, so it is now growing in my garden. They have a section of vegan products which I get occasionally since I am lactose intolerant so I can have cream cheese or sour cream. If there was ANY room in my freezers I would try their frozen dinners.