Hi Katie!

Welcome!

With the bell peppers, you have a couple of choices. My favorite method is to erect shade cloth over the plants. You don't want to block so much sun that growth and fruit set stops, but you want to block enough that the fruit stop scalding. I use a 50% shade cloth (meaning it blocks 50% of the light) set up so that its lowest edge is a foot or two above the tallest pepper plant to ensure good air flow so the plant won't roast. You could use old bedsheets if you do have shade cloth.

Another method that sometimes works is just to feed the pepper plants a high-nitrogen plant food that will push them to produce more foliage. This is a slower solution so you might lose current fruit that are sunscalding.

Be sure you plants are standing upright. If they are not caged or stake, go ahead and carefully stake them now. Often, when peppers get heavy with fruit, they begin to lean sideways and eventually fall over, thereby exposing fruit to sunlight because the orientation of the plant has changed.

In the future, here's a few tips to incorporate at planting time:

1. Stake your pepper plants once they are a foot or 18" tall but before they start producing. I use grade stakes and zip-ties, but I do not pull the zip ties real tight because I don't want the zip ties to girdle the plants' main stems.

2. Cage your pepper plants. I use the 3-ring cages often sold as tomato cages. (Often you can pick them up on clearance at the end of the planting season.) Stage the cage so it won't fall over when the pepper gets heavy with fruit.

3. Position your pepper planting so that taller plants to their south will give them some shading from mid-season on. I often do this by planting east-west running rows of tomato plants along the southern edge of a bed, and then planting east-west running rows of pepepr plants along the northern edge of a bed. The tomato plants are usually tall enough to begin shading the pepper plants quite a bit by June or July depending on when you planted them.

4. Position your pepper plants so that nearby trees (or tall perennials like cannas) will shade them during the heat of the day. I often do this by planting pepper plants at the west end of my garden where they get full sun from sunrise until about 1 pm and then shade thereafter.

Sometimes no matter what you do, the fruit just scald. This is because happy pepper plants just go bonkers sometimes and produce more fruit than their foliage can shade, and our intense summer sunlight is unforgiving. When that happens, if you remove the fruit when you first start seeing early signs of sunscald, you can cut off the damaged portions and use the rest of the pepper.

Good luck with your peppers, and I'm glad you've come out of hiding to chat with us. Now that we know you are here, I hope you'll talk with us regularly!

Dawn

Hi Katie! I have some sun scald on bell peppers that are on the west side of my house. I started parking a car there to shade them. LOL. It's worked, although it looks a bit tacky.

What part of Oklahoma do you live? (If you don't mind saying.)

Hi Katie! I'm Mary. Welcome!

Hi Mary, welcome aboard!

George near Tahlequah

Hi from Owasso!!

Welcome, Katie. Dorothy in Adair County

Hi Katie

Welcome from TX

Kim

Thanks for the tips Dawn- I hadn't thought of putting up a shade, they do get a little shade from my my tomatoes. Seems like nothing is setting flowers right now due to the heat anyway. I did put the 3 ring cages around them when I planted. I'm in okfuskee county, in zone 7a.

I did like the strategic car parking plan, but won't work for my garden! I have a fenced in area past the west end of my yard. My garden is pretty good size- i didn't measure, just went to planting. probably 30'x50' but I didn't plant the whole thing.

I do appreciate all tips! I'm still fairly new to all this- we've been in our place for 3 years and I've been trying to wing it, with some help from my mom, but before that I've only lived in apartments, dorms, and small rental houses- it feels great to have 120 acres to call my own!

Wow. 120 acres?? That's some serious land! You can have all the garden you want...

I like your "handle". It took me a minute to relate it to the Notorious RBG ;) BTW, I have a "Katie" :)

Lol, I think the hubby would probably object to me using 120acres to grow! he thinks he needs it for his cows- or some excuse like that ; p

120 acres would be a bit too much to weed. : )

I did make the Notorious RBG/Notorious BIG connection, but what I assumed was that the KBG meant Katie's Been Gardening. Isn't that logical?

<Carol waving from between Seminole & Wewoka>Hi, Katie!

Hi Katie--this is my third year here at my home, too; and HJ's, too, right HJ? Isn't it wonderful what we can get done in three years!? Nancy from Wagoner Cty.