[GpsFrontier]

Hey that's cool. You honestly don't even need to take the time to call the nurtient company if you don't want to. I enjoy coming here and using the forums as a sounding board for ideas, issues and just plain ol' vents. I always appreciate the assistance and tips you give but please don't feel the need to go out of your way

It's not exactly out of my way because I like to learn everything I can and I would just chock it up to building my knowledge base. Honestly calling them is not high on my need to do list and they would probably be able to provide better information directly to their customers. Though I am interested in what they had to say, and especially if I guessed correctly what they would recomend.

I hope to make tweaks here and there as time goes on and improve where I can and learn as much as possible.

That's all anyone can do (trial and error, live and learn) we all start somewhere.

Just wanted to show the roots and a quick glance at the nute solution.

I don't see anything wrong with the roots or nutrient solution, from the picture anyway.

Lots of GNATS! Where they are all coming from I have no idea.

Pest will get in from anywhere, some can even go directly through the screen on a screen door before they get bigger. Once inside they lay eggs and multiply. Unless it's air tight they get in, once inside pests can be really hard to get rid of.

I ran across a tid bit that mentioned that another potential cause of flower drop off could be because the plants are still doing some heavy veg growth. I think that's fairly evident from the original pics I posted in this thread. These guys are definately growing. What I ran across was specifically talking about pepper plants being grown indoors and it was suggested that flowers might simply be dropping off if the plants are still undergoing heavy vegetative growth. Basically because the plant was devoting more energy to the veg growth and not enough to the flower/fruit development. /shrug....seemed logical anyways.

I haven't herd that myself but guess it's possible. Though if that is the case, I would think they are not getting enough light from the orange and red end of the spectrum. In nature their always present, it just gets a stronger red the later in summer it gets. Even though the bulbs you have say they are full spectrum that doesn't mean it puts out a lot of light from all the different colors in the spectrum, it may be putting out hardly anything from the orange and red ends. I could be wrong but I don't think replacing one for the other will produce good pepper plants either though.

I had mentioned in another thread that I was thinking about making the switch to the hps bulb since I was seeing alot of blooms starting on the plants. I think it was GPS that mentioned I might not want to do that simply because the plants are also still doing veg growth and may not be too happy with the HPS bulb in that regard (which makes sense of course).

Yes, I do remember that even though I am not exactly sure what thread that was. Although I think the plants were much smaller then if I am not mistaken, (not that the plants are big yet). Though I don't know if that would cause the flowers to drop off, not to grow fast yes. But then again I am not an expert, and I do apologize if I steered you in the wrong direction. I do think the plants are big enough to get more red light to them at this point. Not sure I would go all the way with red though, I would perhaps try one of each, then in 3 or 4 more weeks both. But then again I could be wrong.

I know that some people use only the HPS lights for the entire plants life. How well that works for peppers I'm not sure. Personally I would think using both metal halide and high pressure sodium in conjunction with each other would provide the best light for both vegetative growth and fruiting growth at the same time, at least for the first half of the pepper plants life, then switching over to all HPS after that. Then again I use natural light, so I don't need to deal with what spectrum's and intensity the light is putting out, just the weather.