My reaper has produced one pepper to maturity. The plant is seemingly healthy. Big bright green leaves. Loaded with flowers. Every day I find flowers that have dropped off. For reference it’s indoor plant, just shy of 1 year old, in Massachusetts. It is in a southern exposure window so gets decent light for this area of the world in winter.
Anyone have suggestions on how I get this to fruit and not drop flowers?
by Relevant-Pizza5877
7 Comments
Are you hand pollinating? If not, shake every flower with your finger or a small brush.
Agree with above. Get a small fan. Jiggle the plant whenever you walk by. Pollinate by hand.
I just give the flowers a tiny tap from behind the petals or at the base behind where the petal is unfurling. You should be good with this or like others are saying, give the whole plant a nice shake from the main stem to replicate wind.
You could also get a honey bee hive and set it in your house near the Reaper. 50,000 bees should get the job done.
I’m mildly frustrated that I wasn’t doing this. To be honest I did do it for the first pepper. I totally forgot all about it since then though. I must have dropped 50+ flowers already.
Even manually pollinating, I wasn’t able to have a good fruiting success (almost all flowers dropped) until the outside temp was perfect (summer to fall transition).
Vegetative growth was awesome, she was huge. Even with pruning three times she got to be about 6 feet tall and 24″ diameter. Flowers dropped all the time, even with high P and K fertilizers until the temperature went down to the 70s. They hate heat, at least mine did. I think they are too volatile a plant to be perfect. They haven’t been around long
The way I do this is usually just take a q tip to every single flower twice, first go around is just to catch pollen and really doesn’t take much, second go around to the base of the stigma to move pollen around. It works best if you do this daily until fruits are set.