Your Vegetable Plants Might Need Hormone Therapy

A watched pot never boils, and checking to see if your summer vegetable starts have hit puberty yet has the same results. Until now, your adorable little tomato, eggplant, and pepper starts have been spending all their energy growing, producing leaves and gaining mass. Those suckers have been existing on a high that only nitrogen and hope can provide.

But as we hit mid-July, it’s time to face some facts. If your nightshades (the tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant just mentioned) aren’t blossoming—and by that, I mean actually producing flowers—then you’ve got a case of arrested development. The good news is, even plants have hormone therapy options.

Why your plants aren’t setting blossoms

Despite being summer plants, our vegetables and fruit are still very finicky about weather. If it’s too cold, too humid, and even too hot, plants are affected in multiple ways, including failure to thrive, lack of blossoms, and blossom drop.

The nutrients in your soil make up another component of why plants succeed or fail. All plants need a balance of NPK, which stands for nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. While plants need all three, they need more of each at specific times. To grow large, plants need nitrogen. To flower, they need phosphorus to help transfer the energy from roots to blossoms and eventually fruit, and potassium is required to regulate the intake of minerals. For instance, even if your soil has enough calcium to support your nightshades, a lack of potassium may make it impossible for your tomatoes to access the calcium.

Three things to help you better trellis your tomatoes: 

Help plants grow blossoms with hormone therapy

No worries, there is actually a solution: hormone therapy. Blossom Set spray is made up of a synthetic plant hormone called kinetin. Kinetin is shown to naturally occur in plants as well, and it promotes cell division.

It’s easy to apply—you just spray your plants on the exterior, above ground, on each leaf and stem. Ideally you do this in the evening, not at the high heat of the day. And don’t spray it within twenty four hours of rain, as it’ll wash off.

You can spray it at regular intervals, but give it a week to see results. You won’t have blossoms overnight, but you should see an improvement within 7 to 10 days.

Hormone therapy helps a variety of plants

While generally marketed for tomatoes and other nightshades, you can use Blossom Set on cucumbers, beans, strawberries, and a variety of other vegetable and fruit plants.

There are also brands that include potassium and phosphorus in their Blossom Set formula to help promote not just the blossoms but the eventual fruit, too.