Progress and Frustrations

[txice]

Figured I'd make a combination update/vent post.

First the update part. As you can see from the side-by-side images attached, the pepper plants are growing nicely. 2 weeks to the day have elapsed between the different images. Plants all look healthy, really green and almost every single one of them has lots of little blooms starting on them. Even the little Thai Sun plant that I think I damaged when I moved it into this system is on the comeback and has a couple of little buds on him as well. Wife and I even did some work on rearranging the grow room and building new light stands, etc. Really freed up a lot of space in the room and made it much easier to access the plants in the tubs.

The frustrating vent part....can't get any darn peppers to start. Even 2 weeks ago a few of the plants had blooms on them. I left them alone in hopes that they would "take care of themselves" so to speak. We do have a fan in the room that moves the plants pretty well and had hoped that would be enough to assist the plants in self pollinating. Something is amiss however as all of the flowers that open just end up wilting and falling off with no peppers to be found . When we got back from our Christmas trip (happy to report the system ran fine unattended for over an entire week by the way ) I began trying to help the plants pollinate. For the past week I've been doing all sorts of different methods to assist in pollination from tapping the flowers, to shaking the plant, to using a small paint brush to rub around the inside of the flower. Still not seeing any peppers and it's getting frustrating. The nute temp is staying fairly low (70 to 72 range). pH range is good staying around 5.8 to 6.5 (I really need to invest in a digital meter...stupid drops in the test tube bit is difficult to read...hehe). I still have the full spectrum MH bulb above the system and have added a couple of 100W cfl bulbs around 3000K to get a tiny bit more of the reddish range light. Added some of the awesome blossoms into the nutrient mix...but alas it doesn't seem to be working. Trying to be patient and stick with it, but it's getting to be discouraging. Though I guess from going from total noob to where I am now on my first try isn't too terrible.