And now for something completely different.
Yesterday, Kid 1 went outside to check her peppers – more on that later – and came back inside.
“Something is screaming in the jasmine bush.”
We all know that there are cardinals nesting in that giant bush, so Gordon and I run outside. I stand by the bush and don’t see anything.
Screeaaaam.
It’s not a bird, it’s not a cat, or any other mammalian critter. This sounds eerie and weird as hell.
Kid 1 is also weirded out. “What is that?”
Me: I don’t know.
Screeaaaam.
Some creature is clearly in distress and it sounds right in front of me. I lean in to look.
A skinny green snake about a foot and a half is wrapped around the branch. It’s biting a green frog on its butt. The frog is not huge but its body is about 5 times what that snake can swallow. It’s like trying to shove a lime into a drinking straw. Even if the snake unhinged its jaws all the way, this is anatomically impossible.
The snake is not letting go.
Screeaaaam.
Gordon says, “Where are those forceps?”
The forceps are found and brought to him. He plucks the snake with the frog attached out of the bush, convinces the snake to let go, the frog dashes off, and the snake predictably decides to coil around the forceps and my husband’s hand, at which point it is tossed into the underbrush.
I did not take pictures during the ordeal because the matter was urgent, but we have since determined that our guest was probably a rough green snake common to our area of Texas.
The internet tells us that their diet consists of crickets, moths, grasshoppers, and other small thingies. A large cricket was probably that guy’s top prey size. What he was going to do with that frog nobody knows.
The snake matter handled, we check the peppers. Kid 1 had planted a wide variety and I was most excited about Sweet Heat pepper, which our local Lowe’s billed as a slightly spicy bell pepper. I used to eat very spicy food – at one point in my life I would eat Sichuan peppers straight – but I am older now and I try to take it easy. My mouth still likes the heat, but the rest of me not so much.
This is what Sweet Heat peppers look like. We are sure what we are because we planted their little tag next to them.
We tried a green one before and it tasted like grass. Peppers become hotter and their flavor intensifies as they ripen. One of the peppers turned red. So I, confident that I was in safe territory, decided to try it. I plucked it off the plant and bit a small piece.
Then I went directly inside, put the pepper on the island, got milk out of the fridge and then swished in my mouth while my eyes watered. Sweet heat, my ass. This tasted like an off-the-scale habanero. Like burn. Actual burn. Sweet heat peppers are not supposed to taste that way.
Two planters over, Kid 1 raised a ghost pepper, which is hot as hell.
Kid 1, who has my spicy level tolerance, and hers might actually be better than mine, tasted one of these ghost peppers before and described the experience as “instant regret.”
My question to you is, could cross-pollination between the two pepper plants have resulted in the polluting of the sweet bell pepper?
I have seen something similar happen with tomatoes, but only in second generation. Years ago my grandmother had acquired seed for the giant pink tomato. Those things were truly massive, huge tomatoes, sweet and yummy. Everyone liked them. She planted them next to yellow tomatoes, and after a couple of years of collecting and planting the seed we ended up with a hybrid plant which produced meh tomatoes.
Could cross-pollination affect heat level, or did Lowe’s con us into buying habaneros?
Little biology from the garden for you…. keep the yawning to a minimum! You asked! 🙂
Peppers can have heat bred into them (actually my understanding it that originally they were all hot but were bred to be LESS hot to be edible) but capsaicin levels are also affected by the conditions. Stress on the plant causes the heat to rise. Stress can be a lot of things, watering habits, temperatures, etc. So your mild little pepper may have freaked out over some perceived indiscretion – (hey, not accusing you of plant abuse, it could have happened before you got it or the weather may have done it or…) and got extra hot to protect those precious seeds. That or it was mislabeled. In any case you may want to proceed with caution with all of them as I understand you have been living on the surface of the sun down there in Texas and that would cause some stress. On the other hand, “coddling” a hot pepper – perfect water and soil temperatures will create a no heat pepper.
For the tomato, the question would be if the original plant was a hybrid or open pollinated. This determines the outcome of the “children” of the plant.
A hybrid tomato is a cross between two parents. When that tomatoes seeds are planted from that original F1 seed, you have a wide array of possibilities of what might come up. Think Mendel’s pea plant grid but on a bigger scale. It takes approximately 7 + years of breeding to change a hybrid plant’s chaotic offspring to the original desired plant. This is a pretty big undertaking involving growing out hundreds of babies and culling them to preserve only the ones that exhibit the desired traits, saving seed from just those and repeating the process year after year. That first year you may only have 10 plants out of your hundred that actually exhibit the big pink tomato you want to keep. Ditch the other 90 plants, save only seed from that “success” and plant another 100 plants the next year and whoo hoo you might get 24 “yay” plants. Repeat until you get 100 % of what you wanted. Not for the faint of heart!
Open pollinated is a plant that breeds true to type. This is the goal for all that work you did with the hybrid seed. You plant a pink Brandywine tomato, you will get a pink Brandywine tomato from the saved seeds. Tomatoes don’t cross pollinate easily (pollen from another tomato plant transferred to the parent plant) because they often self pollenate before the flowers open but it can happen. Bumble bees visit tomatoes (both new world natives) and sometimes pollen from another flower can be exchanged.
In any case, there’s your science lesson for the day. You may wake up now and no there won’t be a quiz. So far you haven’t made me question your research ability with your garden descriptions and I thank you! Dina and Gertrude’s garden possibilities are swoon worthy and how fun would it be to visit and play about with them. 🙂
Blessings!
Shannon 🙂
Cross pollination should only affect the plants grown from the seed of the resulting fruit. Fruit and flowers are entirely determined by the mother plant, no matter what pollen fertilized the flowers.
Also it’s REALLY common for nurseries, especially big box stores, to misidentify plants. Mixing up hot and sweet pepper varieties is especially common . It happens to my parents all the time; they’ve started growing their own plants from seed because it happened too many times.
The Sweet Heat peppers probably aren’t ghost peppers, they don’t look quite right, and all the ghost pepper varieties I’ve ever grown are pretty hot even when green. I can see them being a habanero variety though.
If you ever want to save seed that you can be sure is from self-fertilizing the plant, you can cover blooms with blossom bags before the blooms open to keep pollinators off the flowers. This usually still results in fruit since peppers self-pollinate so easily from wind shaking pollen onto the pistil, but you can also pollinate them by hand to make sure.
Addendum to my above comment after reading other comments – Peppers do cross pollinate easily. Still shouldn’t cause this issue, but if you save seed while growing different varieties it can be an adventure. 🙂
Tomatoes don’t cross pollinate easily, and I originally assumed peppers were similar since they’re both nightshades and have similar flower structure. Then I saved seeds from 8 different varieties of peppers all grown near each other, and got some WILD hybrids. This has never happened with my tomatoes; to my knowledge I haven’t gotten any crosspollinated tomatoes despite growing 6 very different looking varieties very closely together.
Also, to support my statements – I don’t have a botany-specific degree, but I do have a PhD in Biology, have taken a decent number of botany classes, and garden a lot and started experimenting with creating my own pepper crosses after getting the weird hybrids. One of my hot peppers is now almost a perfect black color!
Cross-pollination between the two pepper plants may result in hotter peppers in the next generation grown from the cross-pollinated seeds: the intensity of the fruit of peppers is primarily from the seed though some organic gardeners claim that this can be affected by what is applied to the plant by way of fertilizers, minerals, microbes…
Check label next time to see if there is a Scoville Heat Units (SHU) ~ rating used to rate the chilli heat /spiciness
If the “ghost pepper” is from Northeast Indian origin, it has a SHU of 1million which is 3 times hotter than Habanero chillies and nearer the 1.5+million for ‘pepper spray’.
Heat level of peppers can be changed by soil and weather. Like drastically changed.
Confirming that because the heat comes from the seeds, standard advice is to widely seperate different varieties of peppers to avoid cross pollination, as it will change the heat of the seeds and therefore the peppers
They could be a a Shishito pepper, based on your photo and searching Google for comparison.
Those look kinda lumpy for sweet heat, I thought they had a smoother bell pepper look but narrower? I’m leaning towards them being mislabeled somehow but could be the pollinization or harsh season making them hot too.
I also garden in Texas (Austin, to be exact). I have had some mis-labeling adventures, such as buying some small sweet peppers that I basically bought for ornamental use in the corners of my garden- I have ended up with a banana pepper and what I think is an Anaheim. Bought what were labeled as cherry tomatoes and have an orange full-sized crop- all good, but not what I planned. Also planted a banana, bell, ‘coolapeno’ and Serrano in the same area, and all taste as they should: did the same last year. So I plunk down in the mislabeled camp, though just an amateur gardener, not as learned as some of those replying. Also have some very noisy frogs!
It does look like bell pepper. Habaneros plant have smaller leaves. I grow them in Florida and I love the spice level because I’m from Jamaica ????????
We have cats that are indoor/outdoor and especially during hurricane season we we’ll meet, dread it because they bring frogs in which does scream and when they escape the climb on the ceilings above our bed and then I exit our bedroom until hubby get them back to safety outside….,eeewww just eeewww
Oh dear! Was giggling so hard about the snake! Poor little frog. My hubby would have running the other way as soon as the snake was spotted!
I’m not much on peppers but checked images of both on Google. May have been mislabeled? Looks to me like the sweet heat peppers are a bit longer then what yours are?
Bell peppers (capsicum) and Black Russian chillies can absolutely cross pollinate in the first generation. I had green capsicum with black stripes and a pleasant warmth that the bees must have done their thing with to create.
The first year I lived in FL, I grew jalapenos, cayenne peppers, poblanos, and bell peppers next to each other. Because I was very close to the water, I did not have bees pollinating, but I did have a lizard that lived in the bushes and I am pretty sure did all of the pollinating by rapidly running back and forth through all of the flowers. The lizard was frequently covered in visible pollen when I saw it, which is where that theory comes from. My resulting peppers from the rapid cross-pollination was that the bell pepper burned my fingers when cutting them up, although none of the heat translated to eating them, and the cayenne peppers looked like bell peppers but still tasted like cayenne. The poblanos and jalapenos, despite being between the other two, turned out without changes. That was also where I discovered that you cannot get hot jalapenos in FL. The amount of water you have to apply to keep them from wilting in the heat causes your jalapenos to have no heat themselves. I had that problem the entire time I lived in FL.
Yes. Sweet and hot peppers should be planted separately. If not all the peppers will be hot.
My first thought is someone being a jerk and switching the tags, so you actually planted something else.
I think someone at Lowe’s (likely another shopper) messed around with the plant labels and you guy’s got ‘ghost peppered’.
I’ve seen people do this when I was still shopping at Lowe’s for plants. I quit going there for that among other reasons. When I could still plant veggies, I would make a road trip up to my parents house and we’d get our plants there.
My mother gets all her bell peppers from a local lady who actually built a green house specifically for her red, yellow, and orange bell peppers. No other species allowed in there. She swore up and down planting any hot pepper near those would ruin them. I thought she was being silly, but I’m not a hot pepper eater either. Looks like she was right.
They’re the same species as the hot ones, I think. Just mutant varieties without the capsaicin!
I grow only sweet peppers and I found out that the odd ball varieties I like get sweeter with a higher sugar content as they get redder not hotter. I had no idea until one of the places I buy the seeds from told me. I had always been trying to grab them at yellow green to avoid heat and turns out I should wait! Corbaci is a great one. Super productive too.
Who knows!?
I have a friend who considers Dave’s Insanity hot sauce a condiment. Me, I don’t mind some burn…but not like that! And I prefer the shorter lived burn, like horseradish.
Yes, you can cross contaminate peppers. I plant my hot peppers in the back yard, and the sweet peppers in the side yard, and every once in a while you will get a bell pepper with a little kick. I guess our bees have a range, and a sense of humor! Try making them into a sweet pepper relish. You can use it in things like chicken salad. You will get a kick without a bunch of burn that way. https://www.keyingredient.com/recipes/535500025/sweet-pepper-relish/
Garden: My parents actually, at a point long ago, grew cantaloupes that tasted of hot peppers. I think that it is pretty easy to get hotter peppers than you expect.
Probably not cross pollination, since that will only impact the next generation, but it could be environmental. Soil composition, water, temperature, etc. will all have an impact on how spicy it is. Long hot dry days (like I assume you get in Texas) will increase the spiciness of the pepper.
You might try growing Cubanelle Peppers – I’ve heard they keep the sweet with a little heat. I don’t know that for a fact yet, but I want to try them next year (too late for me this year). But I would not grow hot peppers that year.
Yes, you can make spicy tomatos if you plant them next to hot peppers
My husband plants jalapenos every year and most of them are very mild, and then randomly there will be one pepper (not plant but single pepper) that is extremely hot (far beyond a normal jalapeno heat).
Those peppers look like scotch bonnet peppers which are very hot. I agree with Dana, the peppers were mislabeled.
+1 on the mislabelling. Additionally, I grew up knowing these as scotch bonnets (my heritage is English West Indies) but I’ve seen them labelled as ‘habaneros’, “red savina”<—-this is have the fire extinguisher aka ice cream on standby.
Thank you, Ilona Andrews for the post.
I ROFLOL, yes this has happened to me. Every year I plant sweet bell peppers and at least one hot pepper for my BIL. After the first year —educational — I learned to plant hot peppers far away from my sweet peppers.
Last year was serano peppers but due to Covid pandemic my Mexican neighbor got them all. So this year it’s Serano peppers again. In containers on porch so I can transport them to BIL home once I am sure they will survive.
I want to laugh. Loudly. No so much about your content but because of your presentation and how it invokes memories of my own garden. Thank you for lightening a very heavy week.
Bit late but yes, this absolutely happens with pepper family cross pollination. Every pepper is a magical mystery roll of the dice!
Cross pollination occurs at the flower stage and it is definitely a possibility that the two peppers mixed.
I was told the definition of ghost peppers, is when u bite into one of those you see the Holy Ghost.
Wendy’s does make a ghost pepper French fries that are to die for, but you should have a glass of milk on standby ????
Your soil will affect the heat as will. we tried growing just jalapeño peppers near Savanah and they came out like ghost peppers. My husband was very pleased. I wasn’t.
Peppers easily cross pollinate, so it’s a definite possibility that the sweet pepper is actually a hybrid and spicier.
Also, peppers get spicier the more “stressed” the plants are. Meaning if the plant isn’t watered adequately, or the weather gets too hot, etc., those conditions make the fruits spicier than normal.
See below’s link for a list of conditions that make peppers spicier.
https://balconygardenweb.com/how-to-make-pepper-plants-hotter-steps-to-spicy-chillies
Has an avid Texas gardener of peppers. It was labeled wrong and is quiet common from box store greenhouse and nurseries like Lowes/Home Depot and even Calloway’s. Usually small nurseries are pretty good about keeping labels correct because they usually grown their own plants in greenhouses, but accidents happen. BTW – I get all my peppers from Lowes (gotta love that 5% discount on the card) and it’s always a crapshoot as to what is actually maturing in the bed. There’s always at least one plant was mislabeled.
BTW – a screaming frog would be an interesting ring tone on a phone. lol.
Lessee, I did actually study college botany and the way your grandmother’s tomatoes worked makes sense. I could see seed from the “bell” pepper churning out hot peppers next year but not in generation zero. Lowes must have screwed up
Cross pollination is totally a thing that happens with peppers. We’ve been trying to get our ghost peppers to tango with the birds eye chili peppers for a while but so far no luck. It apparently only happens when you don’t want it to.
Yes – a subscriber’s husband here. As a radio jock, back when there were – yes kids – local stations, my #1 fan brought me some goodies from his garden. Including some sweet bananas. So I thought. They had grown next to some cayennes. He left. I took a big bite. Flames erupted. A bed of coals glowed where once there was a mouth. Pant. Gasp. Big breath. Mic on. Warm and friendly announcement.
Mic off. Screeam!!!
Also, my father once planted bell & banana peppers next to a pequin bush. Similar effect.
I’m Mexican, I’m from a city called Campeche, and we eat habaneros regularly with all our food. I can tell you that those look definitly like habaneros. They can be red, yellow or green, and they are spicey like hell.