Charlie,

Pepper plants can drop fruit and flowers for several reasons. I'll list them below:

Temperatures below 55 degrees.

Temperatures above 90 degrees.

Excessively dry ground and a lack of moisture, especially in combination with high winds.

Excessively wet ground and a lack of moisture.

Fruit/plants are being attacked by an insect like the pepper maggot or pepper weevil.

In VERY rare cases it can occur because of very high nitrogen, but it would have to be an insane amount of nitrogen because peppers like high nitrogen.

In this case, I'd guess it is too much moisture but that's just a guess, and not a hard guess to make in light of the recent weather.

Normally, when I see pepper blooms or fruit drop, it is with sweet peppers and not so much with hot ones. However, most of my bloom or pepper drop is due to excess heat and dry soil. It usually isn't wet enough here for my plants to be stressed by too much moisture.

Jay grows a lot more hot peppers than I do. Maybe he'll have some ideas that I haven't thought of.

Dawn

Dawn
I pick off a couple peppers with wart type blemishes on them it was another plant. Would that be maggots and what do you do?

Charlie

Charlie,
What is the health of the plant. Does the leaves and stems have good color. What type of jalapeno? Like Dawn my first inclination is excessive moisture. Something I have very little experience here with. Unless I leave a soaker hose on and then in my deep sandy loam soil it is usually tomaotes I have troubles with. I have seen more trouble with some jalapeno types than I have the NM chile types in hot , dry weather. Purple Jalapeno is one that seems to be tempermental about temperature. But normally it does good for me. I see the drop in late June to late August if ht temps are high. Jay

I've noticed over the years that some varieties of peppers when stressed in some ways tend to drop blooms and fruits. Your excessive moisture could be what caused the stress in your case. Jay

Jay

I am only raising this year the Fooled You variety, it has rained an inch and half slow this week with no sunshine. Everything looked great yesterday.

Did you see what I said about the blemished peppers on another plant?

Charlie

Charlie, Those wart-like growths are from a bacterial disease known as Bacterial Leaf Spot, which probably is the most common pepper disease in the USA. It also can cause spotting on the leaves. It is very difficult to control. Once the peppers are infected and you're seeing those little wart-like growths on the fruit, the pepper often rots because the disease has made it inside the fruit. You might be able to control it or at least slow down its spread by spraying a copper fungicide. (I want to hear from Jay to see if he thinks that will work.)

Bacterial Leaf Spot often shows up when the plants are growing in hot and moist conditions, which of course is exactly what we have right now.

When my plants get it, I strip off the infected leaves and peppers and throw them into the trash, not the compost pile, but I don't usually spray the plants. I'm just a real anti-spray person. I DO have a sprayer, but I sure don't use it.

And, to correct what I said earlier, when I typed "Excessively wet ground and a lack of moisture", it should have said "Excessively wet ground due to too much moisture". I think I was looking at the line above as I typed and simply retyped the last half of the previous line like a mindless robot.

Dawn

Dawn,
I hate to say this as it might cause it too change. But I've had very little trouble with my peppers and not sure I've ever had Bacterial Leaf Spot. The Cornell site says it is generally spread by seed so highly suggest treating the seed before planting. Either with heat or Clorox. And for treating plants they suggest copper or copper plus maneb. I've never used maneb and on tomatoes copper hasn't worked well for me. But never tried it on peppers. Jay

Jay,

I think you're pretty safe from Bacterial Leaf Spot on peppers there because it seems to require pretty high moisture levels in the soil plus high humidity in order to develop. I just can't imagine that your area could hold on to high soil moisture/high humidity long enough for it to develop. I don't see it often here...only in the wettest years. I haven't seen it yet this year, and don't even think I had it last year with almost 54" of rain. But, I have had it in years when May and June were exceptionally wet.

I've never used maneb either and in my garden copper seems to work only moderately well. From what I understand. it is almost impossible to eradicate bacterial leaf spot once peppers have it, so the best you can hope for is to keep it from spreading and worsening. However, when my plants have had it, I've often just stripped foliage and peppers that were affected and never had it reappear...but we can go from too wet to too dry here almost overnight when the rain stops, so it may be that my weather gets to dry for it to continue spreading or developing.

This is probably just the start of leaf and fruit issues. I bet next week they'll start popping up practically everywhere that heavy rain has fallen....and not just on peppers either.

Dawn

Dawn I'm expecting the same thing with leaf issues. Especially on my tomatoes. Overall things are still looking good. I have some minor issues that in the past I would be concerned with. Now I just take the wait and see approach. Most times they when things dry out they will go away and other issues will appear. I do over react to a few issues after the last 2 years but leaf issues I usually don't. Jay