Stimulate lower stem regrowth of pepper plant

Question

I've got an indoor pepper plant that has already been through one harvest of 8 peppers. Nearing the end of the first harvest, many of the leaves on the lower stems died off. This may have been due to insufficient nutrients.

I'm fairly sure it has a vibrant root system as I have visibility underneath the grow bag it's currently in. The bag has been penetrated all over with root stems (maybe a sign of insufficient watering - working on that)

In any case, it's now part-way into a second grow cycle and I've reduced the pepper load to 4 max (I'll be clipping extras) in the hopes that the plant won't get over-encumbered.

I cut back a number of stems that the majority of leaves had died on as well as some of the more extended branches and am now left with a plant that's lower 50% or so is pretty much leafless stems (plenty of sunlight) and the upper sections (3 main ones) that have fresh leaf growth and peppers.

I noticed that many of the lower stem nodes have what appear to be new shoots of stems/leaves coming out (maybe 10 or so) however they aren't exactly growing.

It would be awesome if the lower section could be rejuvenated. Is this possible? How can I encourage lower section regrowth?

This is all within a climate regulated environment so time/seasonal changes aren't a limitation.

Answer 1

Encouraging faster growth overall should help, because those branches should eventually grow.

The right kind of fertilizer for your plants should help to speed growth overall. Some people say nitrogen helps leaves more than anything, but I find that potassium and phosphorus also help a great deal there, at least indoors. I think nitrogen helps a lot more outdoors than indoors, but that's just a limited, personal observation. I think maybe this observation is because the commercial soils and NPK fertilizers I've tried didn't have enough available phosphorus and potassium compared to nitrogen, usually, and my outdoor soil is probably different.

Perhaps more important than fertilizer for speeding growth is light. If you can put a lot of light on those new branches that you want to grow (not just sunlight), it should encourage them to grow more. I find that the parts of the plant with the most light tend to grow most and healthiest. So, you could dim the light in the parts you don't want the plant to focus on growing (not too much), and increase the light tremendously near the bottom with grow lights very close to the stem. This should work.