Sweet pepper failure

[maisieandgrace]

My sweet peppers have been a disaster. I grew them in pots and they did very well, had lots of flowers, which set and I looked all set for a bumper harvest. But as they started to turn red they started to rot.The leaves were fine and the plants looked very healthy, apart from the slimy fruit. I couldnt see anything wrong but noticed that a lot of the fruit had small holes bored in them, which seemed to heal and the rot was not centred around these puncture wounds. Had a quick look inside and cant see anything obvious. Any ideas anyone?

[Green Aura]

It looks like you've got everyone stumped, m+g. So, always having the need to fill a vacuum, I'll have a go. Also because we had a similar problem - rotting off, not the holes.

In our case we decided it was a combination of factors-
1) As usual we packed far too much stuff into our tiny polytunnel
2) The weather. Fairly early in the season it got really hot in there - 40+ Then we had a cold snap and it seemed to halt everything, including the growth of our baby peppers
3) Because of 1 + 2 it got very steamy in there at times - especially if we forgot to open the door, which encouraged mould on some of the tomato plants as well

We had about half a dozen plants, of which we managed to rescue two that didn't seem so bad. We brought those into the house, on a south facing windowsill. Although they weren't prolific at least we managed to get a couple of decent peppers off each plant that were fine. Rather a waste of effort but it confirmed, in our minds, the conditions in the polytunnel were the problem.

The other plants got chucked.

The holes? No idea - some sort of bug

[ojay54]

The biggest prob I find,with any pepper is white fly.As with most plants,it's the rot that sets in after white fly damage that ruins the plant rather than the aphid per se.I've no idea what burrows holes through the fruit,but aphid damage shows(before the rot) as sort of tiny scaley marks on the fruit.
Obviously,the best way to counter any sort of rot is to improve ventilation,and don't crowd your plants too much.