I crossed my best performing peppers last year and both were as hot as a jalapeno. The ornamental jigsaw, and the big Jim pepper. The f1 plants are stout and early producing 1½-3 inch curved (still immature) and to my eyes the perfect pickling pepper. However there is no heat at all which is mildly disappointing… Get it? Mildly?
Anywho Its just the one pepper I’ve eaten and I’m new to hybridizing peppers. Could it be that just this first pepper is a fluke? Or an environmental quirk causing a strange expression of genes? Or did both parents serendipitously have the genes for this no heat. I was under the impression heat is dominant so if it is genetic I would assume they were?
Anyone with experience I would like to hear your thoughts please
I can’t answer your question, but I can share an experience from two years ago. I started seed-packet sugar rush peach peppers and had a few extra that I gave to a friend, who lives a little over a mile away. Every pepper from my plants was molten hot, much hotter than a jalepeño. Hers were all so sweet her kids were snacking on them. Same genetics, same start, same area, same climate, different dirt, differing amounts of sun (12 hours for me, 8 or so for her). Did you grow out the F1 in the same place you grew the parents, or could there be some variance in soil or location?
Firstly, ornamental jigsaw that is as hot as a jalapeno? I don’t know that any jigsaw would be as hot as a jalapeno, they are on a completely different level. Type of heat is different between chinense and jalapeno, but I don’t think you can mistake them being in the same level. So maybe it’s mislabeled from the start. Picture of the parents 8if available) and the F1 might help with determining what they are.
I don’t know exactly how heat is inherited, but since heatlessness is a recessive trait, it shouldn’t show in F1. There are plenty of varieties pushed to the market around F4-F5 stage when they are still unstable, but I’m not sure if chinenses even have the same gene making heatless peppers. In any case it’s so rare, that it doesn’t seem likely explanation.
Heat in peppers is fairly unstable so it can be affected a lot by conditions one way or other. I have heard of anectodal evidence about carolina reapers being completely heatless, so not at all surprising that a medium hot pepper is heatless. Also might be just the first fruits. It’s quite common in variety describtions to have wide range in the scoville scale to reflect this variability. Perception of heat also differs from person to person. For me it took couple of years to realize that banana peppers did have some warmth (heat would be overstament) because I’m so used to heat that the very mildest hot peppers aren’t more than just sweet peppers. Banana peppers are supposed to be very mild and have something like 500 or was it 0-1000 in scoville so the range where heat can go unnoticed for someone with tolerance isn’t wide, but that coupled with conditional mildess and it’s easy to get fruits that maybe don’t represent the plants normal heat level. Maybe it has had transplant shock and with the stress just wanted to make fruit ready. Heat develops fairly late in the development and if the plants gets a little push to ripen the fruit as fast as possible, then the fruit might lack heat. Similarly you might get ripe fruits which have undeveloped seeds. Or it just hit the genetic lottery.
For any given gene, If both parents were heterozygous, it would be normal to expect 1/4 of the offspring to be doubly recessive in the F1 cross. 3/4 would be hot, but 2/3 of those would carry one copy of the no-heat genetics.
Capsaicin production is governed by a complex of multiple genes, so it’s actually much less likely to get a truly no-heat pepper, but not unusual to see significant variation in heat. Environmental factors can also play a role, and some peppers will get hotter as they mature. I’d wait and see what you get from a second pepper before judging the plant unless you’re specifically looking for peppers that are hot when immature.
