Decided to grow some peppers for the heck of it, to see what we could accomplish, in the past we've not had much luck. Oh and a tomato plant.

So far we've had a small harvest of peppers, mostly sweet banana and sweet green Italian peppers have done well, no pests, no problems.

The hot banana is another story, it's only produced a few peppers, it gets the same water and fertilizer as the others. Well overnight the reason became apparent, lots of leaves gone, some were eaten to the stem, many holes in the leaves, in no time at all.

We've had a ton of rain in the past week, it seems to have hit the tomato plant as well.

Checking the leaves there are tons of tiny caterpillars on the underside, so I removed them, bagged and tossed in the trash, either the whole leaf or the worm and sprayed the plant down with a soapy solution.

Funny how they don't like the sweet pepper plants but love the hot pepper plant...

Any suggestions other than the soapy spray solution that I found online that would be a good defense for the plants, don't want to cover it with insecticide for obvious reasons.

Going down to the DIY place today for yard fertilizer, I'll have to see what they suggest as well

I use a hose in sprayer,,mix 1 part dawn to three parts of water in tank.
Be sure to spray the under sides of leaves,actually I only spray up that is where the little bugger hide and eat.

I got a dollar store spray bottle with that dawn mix and use it with a wide mist spray, those suckers sure can eat a plant up in no time flat.

If y'all don't mind me asking a piggyback question in this thread.....I just got home from a California trip. Some sort of beetles just devastatingly devoured the leaves on my potato plants while I was gone. There's not a leave left. Will any leaves come back if I spray something, and what would you recommend?

Should I leave them in the ground, will they grow any more leaves, will the potatoes grow any more? Or should I just harvest now what I can get?

Thanks!

If they're smooth-skinned worms - regardless of the plant - then anything with BT (bacillus thuringiensis) in it is your best friend. Deadly for the worms, perfectly safe for the humans. Thuracide and DiPel used to be a couple of the leading brand names...amazing stuff.

I toss mine to the chickens.
Though I had a Robin snatching them off this afternoon.