Peppers will keep going until frost. I see your a zone 7? You should be able to get more.

Don't know if you haven't gotten more peppers, but I was in the same situation and my plants each have a couple more peppers on them.

I'm new at container gardening, or any gardening for that matter. I have two bell pepper plants that have been growing very well. One pot/plant has about 10 peppers growing, and the other has 8 or more. Lately, the plants have been dropping their flower buds. I examined the leaves and I could not find any creepy crawlers. However, on a few of the leaves (about 10 or 12) I discovered wavy white lines with a black hair-like line strung down the middle of the white stuff.

I live in Los Angeles. (This started happening before the fires.) The weather has been warm to hot, but the night temps have been chilly. In the 50's. Are the chilly nights causing my bud droppings, and do I have a disease?

In my experance....
plants will drop buds when 1. it's too cold/warm to set fruit, 2. when the plant is already full of fruits 3. just to annoy me. Peppers are perrennials, and out here in riverside I grow them year-round, so yours should be fine. Just pick them when they're ripe and new ones will replace them.

The white lines sound like leaf miners, which are normal, no reason to worry if the rest of the plant is overall healthy.

In my experience a first year bell pepper plant should produce 6-12 fruits on average. If you harvest them before they ripen then maybe more. If you plants only produced a couple each I would look at changing some things.

I would look at my watering, fertilizing and planting mix. I would also consider trying a different variety assuming these 3 plants were all the same variety. Bells can be tricky for a lot of people and they are generally regarded as the most finicky of the peppers commonly grown in terms of weather.

I have far better results with bells in containers than in the garden whether grown in the ground or raised beds using Mel's mix. Your mileage may vary, but bells doing better in containers is something I have seen a lot of people report.

Thanks for the info.

I read somewhere that the only thing you can do for leaf miners is to cut off the infected leaves. I tried that before I posted, but every day more leaves are infected. Now they are on some of my tomato leaves. I have a lot of bell peppers and tomatoes on my plants. Don't they need their leaves? What can I use to deter that "criminal fly" that is making deposits on my leaves? I also read somewhere about spraying "neem" oil on the leaves, and covering plants with nylon netting.

As you can see, I have been doing a lot of reading to save my big crop of bell peppers and tomatoes. So, what do you guys recommend that I do besides amputating the leaves with leaf miners on them?

Are the leaf miners damaging the leaves to the point they fall off? In a lot of cases the damage will just be cosmetic and the leaf survives. Just has curious looking squiggly lines.

You can try the neem, but don't apply it in the mid day sun. Also, mix it with a squirt or two of insecticidal soap to help mix it and get even coverage. I find neem helpful for a lot of things, but it isn't foolproof.

Allegedly, a lot of pepper (and tomato) growth relates to the depth of the soil. In SFG a lot of people use really shallow planting beds. It's not that you "can't" grow stuff like in that situation, it's just that it's probably not going to have the harvest it would otherwise. Maybe if you raised the part of the garden with your peppers so it has more root room it might get larger next year.