Why peppers wither and how to treat them?

Seedlings belonging to a particular garden crop can wither from improper care and inappropriate conditions, and pepper is no exception to this rule. To save dying seedlings, there are several ways, not all of them are effective when time is lost.

Incorrect conditions for the growth and development of pepper, good fruiting during the harvest season – high temperatures in the heat, lack of rain, soil that is too acidic or oversaturated with alkalis, swampy terrain, an attempt to germinate it without a greenhouse in the Far North. Transplanting too late is also a violation if you do not have an all-weather heated greenhouse that continues to work even in winter.

The reasons why pepper wilts are as follows.

1. Watering during the heat. You will not open the tap for half a day, even when you have free water on your site, taken from a well and poured into a cistern through a manual pump. If watering on open ground in the heat quickly ended, then the wet earth will heat up to 55 degrees or more in an hour, and the water, which will become almost hot, will simply scald the roots of the plants. The first signs – the top falls, the leaves hang, it is not possible to save the affected plant. Such violations also include watering with overheated water in the tank.
2. Untimely application of fertilizers. It is extremely difficult to make black soil from podzolic soil – it would be necessary to fertilize the soil for at least three years with huge portions of organic matter before the humus accumulated so much that the soil changed its color from grayish to almost black. Too rare top dressing, especially on extremely poor soils, for example, clayey-sandy, leads to depletion of pepper, a small amount of yield, plants do not gain the necessary splendor and crown width, standard (characteristic of a particular type of crop) height. The main food for plants, in addition to ash and plant residues, are potash and phosphorus fertilizers.
3. Refusal of treatment against insect pests, mold, fungus and pathogenic bacteria. The defeat of late blight, putrefactive formations is a natural phenomenon: all these pathogens of “garden ailments” appear where weeds have grown to the waist and above, the owner’s feet have not set foot for weeks. It is necessary to use at least folk remedies – boric acid, iodine, potassium permanganate, iron or copper sulfate, if you do not want to use pesticides and herbicides.
4. Refusal from forming, sanitary pruning, pinching, pinching and other procedures, aimed at limiting the growth of excess green growth, which takes the lion’s share of nutrients that are absorbed from the soil in the form of an aqueous solution when irrigating garden crops.
5. Untimely watering – not every day or every two days, but, say, once a week. A plant that does not receive enough moisture weakens and slows down or completely stops growth. A common mistake – watering with boiled chilled water, as well as at temperatures below +18 – can kill pepper, and indeed any cultivated plant.
6. An attempt to grow pepper not in black soil. The minimum nutritional soil is chestnut, but it should not be clay. In clay, especially in the one that is smeared after watering and is poorly washed for a long time, there is practically no air: it does not pass water well, practically “closes” the roots in an airless space. And they, in turn, also need minimal, but still breathing. As a result, if seedlings sprout (when planting seeds in open ground), they will grow poorly and soon die. Germination of a plant in sand that does not contain any useful substances (quarry, washed sand without fertilizers) will not give results: the seedlings will simply have nothing to eat, and if the application of mineral and organic fertilizers does not arrive in time, they will not grow and will also die.
7. Do not make such mistakes – pepper, like any culture, needs timely nutrition., watering and disease protection. To reduce water consumption, you can germinate peppers in a hermetically sealed greenhouse, from where water does not evaporate, and where there is always – every day – bright light. This is evidenced by the cases of experimenters who tried to grow various cultures in a tightly closed 19-liter bottle or container with transparent walls.
8. Growing seedlings in the sun in extreme heat, on the windowsill above the radiators, turned on at full power, can destroy newly hatched plants.

The list of diseases that “love” to infect peppers is as follows: gray rot, black leg, fusarium, verticillosis and late blight. By the way, phytophthora also affects tomatoes. The task is to prevent the “spread” of these pathogens throughout the site, otherwise it would be necessary to dig up and burn everything that you had grown before this “invasion”.

Gray rot of sweet pepper affects seedlings and places of germination of new shoots from already existing main lashes. The causative agent is a fungus that parasitizes on 200 cultivated and ornamental plant species. It can also infect fruits. Appears in the form of greenish-grayish spots in which spores multiply. The leaves are turning yellow. If the plant is not treated, it will soon die. First of all, some side shoots are affected. Treatment is spraying or smearing with imidazoles (a class of pesticides).

The blackened leg is the lower part of the stem affected by microbes. The culprit of such a defeat of the bush is the soil in which these bacteria divorced. Treatment of the disease is carried out at an early stage, until the stem has become thinner, which is why the whole plant dies quickly. The first signs are that the stem is discoloring. Yellowing, necrosis of the leaves along the edges are observed. This disease cannot be detected until a significant part of the stem is affected. To destroy the “black-legged” microbes, a 1% solution of potassium permanganate is used, which is sprayed on the plants themselves and watered the soil. 3 g of potassium permanganate is diluted in a bucket of water – the solution should be light raspberry. After watering and spraying with this solution, seedlings or grown pepper plants should not be watered for at least three days.

Phytophthora fungus infection begins with fruits. A brown “rash” passes to leaves with side branches, from where it also enters the trunk. More than a dozen fungicides are used to treat late blight.

Fusaria infect plants of bitter and bell peppers from the inside – they get there with water, along with nutrients, through the roots, directly from the soil. When the fungus grows inside the stem in the form of dark threads, it takes on water and nutrients, clogging the thinnest vessels, and the plant withers, then dies and dries. Both the upper and lower leaves immediately wither and die off along with the top. From folk remedies, an infusion of cow dung and ash helps – it is prepared in a ratio of 1: 3, filtered after infusion for three days. Plants are watered under the root. Affected plants are destroyed.

Signs of verticillosis are dead areas of roots starting from their tips. It can be detected only by fruits that differ from healthy ones. The fungus may not interfere with flowering and fruiting for some time, in some cases even ripening of the crop is possible. It is not always possible to cure an affected plant, the best measure is preventive methods, however, a mixture of copper sulfate and lime, as well as the Trichodermin biological product, can still help out. A weak solution is prepared – no more than 1%, after which the plants are completely sprayed with it.

Ant colonies can be bred with sugar dissolved in a weak solution of boric acid. Ants eat sugar, some of them drown in this syrup, the survivors carry boric acid throughout the anthill, and it eventually goes bankrupt. Another way to get rid of ants and keep them from starting is to water your garden beds abundantly. In the place where they settled, they flood with water so that they run away, or, again, pour a weak solution of boric acid or iodine.

To bring out the whitefly, the plants are sprayed with a mild soapy solution. It is easy to make such a solution: laundry soap is dissolved until the resulting solution begins to lightly lather hands. But potassium permanganate, iodine and boric acid are also suitable for whiteflies, as well as for ticks, aphids and other pests.