Pepper Plants Dropping Flowers (Prevent Blossom Drop)

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What Causes Pepper Plants To Drop Flowers? Pepper plants dropping flowers and buds is one of the most common problems when growing peppers.

When the flowers start falling off your pepper plants you may be quick to blame yourself for not caring for it properly.

But please don’t do that!

Peppers can be finicky to grow and pepper blossom drop is often caused by weather conditions that are outside of your control.

These are common causes of pepper blossom drop.

Causes Of Pepper Blossom Drop

Extreme Temperature Changes

Peppers have a temperature range they like to grow in and that also encourage the fruit to set. If the temperates go above or below this range the plants will often stop fruiting to try and keep the parent plant healthy.

Generally bell peppers like daytime temperatures between 70F to 85F (21 C to 20C), and the nighttime temperatures between 60F to 75F (15C to 24C).

When the temperatures go outside of these ideal conditions for a week or more the plants will start to drop flowers. This means that the odd hot day you really don’t need to worry about, but if you have extreme temperatures over 105F during the day they could start dropping flowers very quickly.

Poor Pollination

Peppers are self-pollinating but they do need some type of vibration on the plant to cause pollination. This could simply be the wind or a bee buzzing around on the flowers.

If your plants have poor air circulation around them or a lack of pollinating insects this can cause flowers to fall off because they weren’t pollinated to set fruit.

Humidity Levels Are Off

While peppers are a tropical plant they surprisingly don’t grow that well in humidity that is too high or too low. They prefer a range of 35 to 70% humidity for the best growth and pollination. Humidity levels outside of that can affect the viability of the pollen and cause blossom drop too.

High Nitrogen Levels

While you do want a nice rich soil to grow your peppers in, you don’t want to over fertilize the plants with a lot of nitrogen.

If peppers are given too much nitrogen they will grow into lush plants but have little flowers and fruit. Avoid excess nitrogen in favor of fertilizers that promote plant setting fruit.

Watering To Much Or Too Little

When peppers are grown in drought-like conditions or over watered it cause them a lot of stress that can lead to blossom drop. Thankfully this one is normally easily controlled. Make sure you are only watering your pepper plants when the top 2-3 inches of soil have dried out.

Watering deeply but less often will encourage the plant’s roots to grow deeper into the soil.

How To Prevent and Cure Blossom Drop In Peppers

Temperature

Controlling the temperatures in your garden sure isn’t easy, is it? While we might not be able to control the weather there are some things we can do to help our pepper plants not drop their flowers.

If you live in an area that gets really hot summers, try planing the pepper plants in an area that gets full morning sunlight, but will be shaded in the hot afternoon sun.

If this isn’t something you can do then you can try using shade cloth hung over your plants. It will diffuse the light and help to lower the temperature under it.

If you are struggling with a cool summer, then try increasing the temperature using floating row covers or plastic covers over or around your pepper plants.

Increasing Pollination

If you are having good growing weather but flowers are still dropping because of lack of pollination, this is something you can actually fix.

If you are growing just a few pepper plants you could manually pollinate the flowers by gently rubbing a Q-Tip inside them. Another way would be to gently shake the plants a little each day to simulate a natural wind.

For larger pepper gardens the best way would be to plant flowers that attract pollinators to your garden.

Increasing Humidity

While there is little you can do to decrease the humidity if it’s a dryer growing season you can increase the humidity around your pepper plants pretty easily.

Simply misting the pepper plants lightly with water a few times a day will help to raise the humidity around the plants.

Another way that is even easier is to water the plants deeply and apply a wood chip mulch around the base of the plants.

Have The Right Nitrogen Levels

The easiest way to make sure your pepper plants have enough nitrogen is to top off the growing bed with good compost before planting the peppers.

Most of the time this application of compost will be more than enough nitrogen to keep them growing nicely until they start to set flowers.

If more nitrogen is needed for poor soils you can use a gentle organic fertilizer like compost tea or fish emulsion.

But after the flowers start blooming you will want to reduce the nitrogen you’re giving the pepper plants and supply enough potassium and phosphorus instead for good flowering and fruit setting.

If your soil is deficient in magnesium try adding 1 tablespoon of epsom salts around the base of the plants and mixing that in. Epsom salts can help plants improve flowering and fruit set.

Find the best fertilizers for vegetable gardens here.

Be Patient When Growing Pepper Plants

Remember that as far as most garden plants go peppers are a little fussy but well worth growing! Try your best to provide the right growing conditions for your plants but realize that some things are just outside of our control.

When the weather conditions improve your pepper plants will stop dropping their flowers and start producing again.

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