So, about 2 weeks ago now, I hoed my peppers and the next day 2-4 suddenly started to wilt. This was very disturbing, but I figured that I must have just nicked there roots a bit too much, and went on watering like normal. A week later and another dozen or so were wilting. And so I really started googling. Apparently, there aren’t *too* many things that affect peppers (vs most other vegetables), and cause them to wilt. The two big ones being Fusarium and Verticillium wilts, both of which are caused by fungus’s. And both of which can, apparently be controlled (supposedly) by applying cornmeal to soil around the affected plants (and which also apparently helps keeps weeds down…). So, I hoed and mixed a whole bunch of cornmeal into my beds (probably 5-6# in 4 15-20′ long beds).
After continuing to google around about fungus wilts I read about spraying peroxide on affected plants (which apparently is also a fungicide – makes sense when you think about it, huh?), and so I went out and sprayed all my peppers (and most everything else except the tomatoes…) with peroxide yesterday. Now, it could just be my imagination, but I swear to you that today (2-3 days since applying cornmeal and 1-2 days since spraying with peroxide) that my plants which were unaffected look beautiful, and while some are definetly dead, the others look no worse than they did a few days ago, and possibly a bit better…
Of course, then today I hear about how late blight has been confirmed to be in OH (a major disease of potoatoes & tomatoes – apparently its what caused the famous irish potato famine back in the 1840s), and which is also apparently caused by a fungus of some sort. A couple of my tomatoe plants have suddenly started to look sickly in the past couple days, so I think tommorrow I’ll be spraying them & my peppers with peroxide really really well and then on Sunday I’ll have Kevin spray with the other spray we’ve been using for the last couple months.
So… we’ll see. I really hope that my remaing peppers survive and give us lots of peppers & that some of the sickly looking ones come back… and that my tomatoes don’t all succomb to late blight or powdery mildew, or something else!!
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