Bell Peppers in the heat!

[b54red]

Originally Posted by greentiger87

For the second year in a row, my pepper harvest is likely to be very mediocre. Some very virulent strain of bacterial leaf spot (xanthomonas campestris) is apparently everywhere in my neighborhood, and some version of it is on all the plants from local growers. Only my seed grown plants, disinfected with hydrogen peroxide, stayed disease free - until now. I got about 10 peppers from each plant, which isn't terrible - but I used to pick them all summer long. Now I had to pull one out because of the disease. I'll use Serenade on the remaining plants, but they'll likely succumb to if it's anything like last year.

I always liked that peppers were one crop I never had to spray for. So much for that

If that is the same speck disease that plagued all of my peppers a few years ago Serenade won't help much if at all. That stuff got so bad that the peppers were inedible when they actually got big enough to eat. They were covered in specks which would eventually rot the fruit and the leaves were covered in specks. I spent most of one season treating the plants with dilute bleach sprays and various fungicides before I finally got it under control. I had never sprayed my peppers before that summer. Now I spray them every time I spray my tomatoes with Daconil and I haven't seen any foliage diseases on my peppers since then. If my tomatoes get any disease that the fungicides don't prevent I spray them with a dilute bleach solution and if I have enough in the sprayer I always spray my bells too.

Bill