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Wednesday, August 17, 2005

Pictures from my Garden, Blossom End Rot Information

Some of these are a little blurry, still getting used to this camera. (8(|)

Backyard plants from front to back, left to right:
  • Peppers - orange rectangle
  • Peppers - big green rectangle
  • Peppers - white circle
  • Tomatoes - huge plant in the middle
  • Sunflowers - all four circles on the right. Notice how squirrels ate the middle ones in half - sprinkling the ground with crushed red pepper seems to have deterred them since.
  • Peppers - green rectangle on table
  • Jalapenos - behind tomatoes
  • Sunflower - HUGE yellow one in back - the head is so large and heavy, it bends!
  • Peppers - on the deck in the orange rectangle
  • Morning Glories - on the deck climbing the house

Blossom End Rot:
Two or three more days, and Wilkes Barre breaks its record for the most 90 degree temperatures in a summer. GOOD LORD! Anyway, this problem is the reason 3/4 of my first crop of peppers has blossom end rot (BER). The bottom 25-50% of the peppers are mushy and grey/yellow, but the part of the pepper that looks ok is still edible (hooray!). The main cause of BER, I've found, is the soil going from extreme wet to extreme dry. It happens on the extremely hot days, when I'm at work - I don't have any kind of irrigation set up (THIS year...sure will next year!), and I give them a full water at 9 before I leave for work - but if I can't come home to water them over lunch, by 5pm they're bone dry. Then I would give them a full watering to make up for it - and the roots would get shocked. That shock causes BER. There are some ways to counter it - and it seems like mine are coming back and this crop will be more of a 25-40% blossom end rot ratio. Luckily my tomatoes haven't been too affected, mostly because they're in a much larger pot, and shaded more than the pappers (which have since been moved to be shaded as well).

Resources

[1] Blossom End Rot Information from Ohio State
[2] Blossom End Rot Information from Cornell
[3] Commonly Encountered Pennsylvania Spiders - Penn State Entomology Department Fact Sheet
[4] Sunflower Seeds Strawberry Blonde Sunflowers at The Sunflower Farm

3 Comments:

  • love the pics - thanks!

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 7:59 PM  

  • That is one awesome picture of that basil plant! WOW! How did you get it to grow so huge??? Did you use fertilizer? What type of basil plant is it? (sweet basil maybe?) How long did it take you to grow it that big? My e-mail address is matlutzac@hotmail.com Your site is pretty cool!

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 2:02 PM  

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