I recently posted about selecting hot peppers and how I pay careful attention to each plant and place the fruits from individual plants into quarts.
I usually let these continue ripening in the quarts for a couple of weeks, and then choose those for seed.
Well, a few days after placing my peppers into quarts, but before saving any seed, there was a slight onion mishap.
A tower of red onions bags collapsed and tumbled into a rack of ripening peppers…
Emptying and mixing the quarts …
Leaving a mess of hot peppers with little way to distinguish accurately one pepper from another. Most of these peppers made their way from here to the market bin.
I was a little disappointed (perhaps a touch more than a little …) to lose a generation of selection.
On the bright side, I did take good records and I have remainder seed from last year. For 2013, based on my notes and pictures, I can narrow down the strains I grow out to those I really like this year.
Moral of the story: keep remainder seed and watch out for those onions!
Hi Dan!
Next time maybe you could use a fine point “Sharpie” to code the different peppers, just in case…? You never know when a kid, a klutz, or a bag of onions (!) will ruin your painstaking work!
That would definitely have helped in this situation.
I often do mark larger sweeter peppers with a Sharpie but I was never tempted to with small hot peppers. Maybe this will change my actions!
Dan