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A common problem when growing pepper plants is accidentally overwatering them. As these veggies don’t like to be soaked, you have to be careful with your watering schedule or else you can cause serious damage.
Below, we take you through the steps you should take when you have an overwatered pepper plant. Move quickly, because every moment that your plant is left soaking is a moment that its roots are being deprived of oxygen.
Stop Watering Your Pepper Plants Immediately
If you see signs of overwatering pepper plants, stop watering immediately — and resist the urge to give just a little more water as the plant’s leaves start to wilt and yellow.
At this point, you need to focus on recovery, and you shouldn’t think about watering the plants until the soil dries out completely.
Move Your Peppers to a Shady Spot
When your pepper plants are waterlogged, it may seem strange to move them to a shady spot. After all, won’t sunlight help dry up the water?
It’s actually the fact that the sun will quickly dry out the plant that’s the problem. When you overwater plants, you stress them out. Allowing for quick evaporation in an effort to solve the problem will only lead to more stress.Instead, move your plants so they’re shaded. The water will still evaporate, but it will do so at a slower pace so as not to shock the pepper plant any further.
Of course, it’s easy to move potted plants to shade. If you have outdoor pepper plants in the ground, you can’t move them to shade — you have to bring the shade to them. You can easily accomplish this with some stakes and shade cloth.
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Fix Insufficient Drainage
While overwatering your pepper plants is the primary problem, improper drainage is a contributing factor.
If you have proper drainage, the excess water would be able to run off easily.
Fixing poor drainage in plants in pots is generally easy. If the drainage holes are blocked, clear them and consider adding a layer of rock at the bottom of the pot to prevent soil from clogging the holes. And if you don’t have enough drainage holes, add more.
It’s more difficult to improve drainage for planted peppers. The best solution is to replant your peppers on a mound. Build up the soil where you’ll plant the pepper so that surplus water will drain farther into the ground, away from the roots.
Remove Dying Leaves and Root Rot
Depending on how long your peppers have been waterlogged, they may already be showing signs of damage. As difficult as it may be, pruning those areas of the plant that have no hope of recovering is necessary to restore your waterlogged fruits back to healthy pepper plants.
In minor cases, the leaves may be wilted and starting to turn yellow. If you see these signs, there’s no need for pruning.
However, in more serious instances where the plants have been deprived of oxygen for a while, leaves may be dying and the root system may have begun to rot.
At this point, you’ll want to prune the dying leaves so that the plant can focus its recovery efforts elsewhere and remove rotting roots to keep the issue from spreading.
While your pepper plant may look ragged for a while after pruning, with proper care, it won’t be long until you see new leaves.
RELATED POST: Understanding the Pepper Plant Life Cycle
Slowly Bring Back the Direct Sunlight
As soon as your pepper has dried out, it’s time to reintroduce it to full sunlight. Just take care to do this slowly as big changes like this will stress your plant.
Start by allowing a few hours of morning sun, and then transition to full sun. You’ll do this by moving your pots or adjusting the temporary shade you created for your in-ground plants.
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