Monday, May 07, 2012

Early flowering chilli plants

Quite a few plants have started to flower, far too early as a 
result of using growlights.
I'm tempted to leave the flowers on, but probably best to pick 
them off to give the plants chance to grow more before setting fruit.





3 comments:

Daniel said...

Will the plants flowering now affect the growth of the plant? My plants have been forming flowers for a while and some of them have proper flowers on them now, but they're still growing.

Plotting said...

Hi there,

To be honest it's completely upto you to leave / pick the flowers.

Some people pick off the first flowers to encourage further plant growth.
With Sweet peppers for example, I remove some of the flowers so that the remaining fruit are larger.

You can leave them on, however if the plants are still indoors
you may need to manually pollinate the flowers -- unpollinated flowers will simply die and drop off the plant.
Pollination is as simple as gently dusting the inside of each flower with a dry cotton bud to transfer pollen between flowers.

At the flowering stage, plants benefit from feeding - either specialist feed like Chilli focus, or bog standard tomato feed is good as well.
The key is not to overwater plants, they really don't need much water and overwatering will cause flower drop and yellowing of leaves.

JB

Plotting said...

Edit -

I meant to add, my plants are still quite small so I plan to pick off most of the flowers then let them flower fully once it's warm enough to put them in the greenhouse.

Being the first time I've used a growlight, must admit they've never flowered this early before/