Chilli Plant Help please!

[pip_da_trip]

Afternoon,

I have been growing some Dorset Naga chilli's at work. The plant has done really well and is looking really healthy, nice green leaves and what not. It started flowering about a week or two ago however since then it has been hit with these dreaded black flies which I have found out are fungus gnats, there aren't many of them, about 10ish. I've been killing them on sight and have bought some Perlite which is on the way. Apparently this stops the blighters from being able to lay anymore eggs. I've also bought a Drosera capensis plant which is on the way and should hopefully make mincemeat out of any of the remaining flies.

The only problem is now though some of the flowers are dying, some have gone brown and some the stem and the flower have both died and dropped off.

I've read the flowers are supposed to drop off but nothing about the stems as well.

I've been pollinating them with a paint brush and the only thing that's not making me panic is the stems which have fallen off have been pretty small anyway so I'm guessing it might be the plant saving energy.

Can anyone help, should I start panicking?

[The Large One]

are you feeding the plant ?
as flowers start appearing you should ramp up the feed (or just start feeding, depending which books you read) it might be that the plant has not got the energy to fruit so aborting the flowers

[eirish]

If you've got fungus gnats you might be keeping them too wet?

[pip_da_trip]

I have been feeding yes, to be honest it took a while for the food to arrive so when it did I gave it a big serving and then since have been feeding the normal dosage, the thing is the food says on sight of flowers to give 10ml of food per litre of water but I haven't been giving the plant that much water as it doesn't really seem to need it. I started giving it more water and that's when the fungus gnats made an appearance!

[Pa Snips]

What size pots are they in? How much room have the roots got?

My chillies and sweet peppers all shed buds before even opening into flowers when they were cramped in small pots. Since putting them in large pots with plenty of room for the roots the sweet peppers have done really well and I have loads of small fruit, open flowers and buds, while the chillies have produced loads more buds which are looking much healthier and greener than the previous ones.
I had thought it might be down to a nutrient deficiency but feeding them made no difference, in fact I haven't fed them since putting them in big pots (Morrisons' flower buckets to be precise) and as I said, they're doing much better now.

[pip_da_trip]

Oh really!! Hadn't even thought about that, to be honest it is getting pretty big the plant so a bigger pot actually makes sense! I'll have to take it home with me tonight and upgrade it. To be honest that might be a good thing anyway because I hear those flies keep their eggs in the soil so disturbing them might actually do me some favours!

Thanks for the advice!!