My peppers have sprouted! I’m focusing on the sweet ones this year. Great germination without any supplementary heat, though we did get some warm days shortly after planting.
Please share your experiences with the 2025 pepper mixes here!
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My pepper seeds were not GTS, but I’ve got lots and lots of sweet peppers to plant out this weekend! I put some out last Monday, and more still to put out. I ended up killing all my spicy pepper seedlings, so I purchased some seedlings. I’ll see about saving seed from these peppers and I’ll try again with the spicy ones next year.
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The first rainy day of fall has arrived in coastal Northern California. The pepper harvest this year has been good. Plants grew a bit taller this year, weather was reasonably cooperative, and some new crosses showed up in my garden. My favorite of the season is this plump and pointy chocolate brown one.
If you’ve had a successful pepper harvest, I hope you’ll set aside seeds from some of your earliest, tastiest, and most resilient plant to share back to our seed share program. Returning some of what you grew helps the quality of our seeds improve year to year. For instructions on returning seeds, look at this page on our website.
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I harvest the seed from mature ones this last weekend. One of the peppers looked like the red one in your photo except longer. It turned out to be hot. Other peppers were not hot except one supposedly heatless jalapeno. So my assumption is that I should not include any seed from this in my sweet pepper grex or GTS sweet pepper grex.
I had planted GTS sweet grex then added heatless jalapeno, heatless habanero and Jimmy Nardello. I don’t think the large hot one would have been one of those.
I will id the hot plants and remove them from this area. I plan on over wintering the ones I test as sweet for next year.
In another area I have hot peppers. They should be ready this weekend.
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I’m saving a lot of seeds; I didn’t notice that much superior performance compared to last year.
And like Bruce, some of my sweet peppers turned out to be hot. I’ve never planted any hot peppers, and my nearby neighbors don’t seem to have gardens, so I’m assuming the new seed I got from GTS included some hot pepper seeds.
So I won’t be turning in any seeds this year either; I will focus on eliminating the hot genetics next year. My research seems to indicate that heat is genetically dominant, so one round of selection should remove it.
It points up the fact that some contributors to GtS grexes are probably rather cavalier in their approach to isolation and seed sorting; maybe something we should put more emphasis on.
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I’m sorry to hear folks got some spiciness in the sweet mix. I haven’t encountered any, but I grew mostly my own seeds with a pinch from the mix.
I appreciate you holding back and trying to clean that up next year. Maybe I need to be more rigorous about what we accept… this is a tricky one. Perhaps next year we should prioritize sponsoring a pepper grow out (like we did for some other crops this year) to ensure a good quantity of seed that is crossed but without the spicy genes.
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That might be a good idea. It was just a few plants, but by the time we realized they had had a chance to cross with everything else.
Could even have been somebody using the same tray or screen to dry seeds, and a few got mixed in, rather than a cross.
I’m going to write a post about the wider question of maintaining desirable traits.
All in all I’m satisfied with my sweet peppers so far. 3 out of 4 shrugged of frost like it was nothing. They all were very dramatic however during the drought unlike my hot peppers. Is that typical for sweet peppers?