I would love to have the sweet pea seeds :) I am growing tomatos from a nursery right now, so I could repay your generosity in the fall after they set fruit and I harvest some seeds- I expect to have at least Cherokee Purple, Black Cherry, and Soldacki seeds at the end of the season.

I know some gardeners in cold climates dig up their peppers at the end of the season, plant them in pots, trim them back quite a bit and keep them inside either in a sunny window or under lights. In my area you can overwinter them outdoors in a protected place, but as most of the posters on this old thread say, I haven't really noticed any benefit to doing so. I generally just restart them every year.

I'm happy to have found this forum. I've luckily grown a few bushes of Tepins this summer in Michigan. This was my first real attempt at gardening after years of wanting to try. Funny as it may seem, I thought they were Cheyenne peppers till they fruited and then was waiting for them to start growing long and red (didnt say I was a good gardener lol) Then the Gal at work gave me a few more peppers she got from her father in TX. to try again next spring. They still had the stem on them and thats when the "pop" sound happened (you know when someone pulls their head from...) And WOW! I have a wood carpenters tool crib with about 10 nor 11 plants and about 10 or so "berries" on them :) Thats when I started researching them on the internet. I brought them in for the early frost and they are looking well. A couple of questions though, do they get hotter when red? and are the leaves supposed to be a bit on the dry-ish side?

I've been eating food cooked with tepins as seasonings for over 50 years. I decided to grow some a few years back by planting seed from dried tepins. The success rate was about 1 in 20 to get a plant that actually grew to something that would bare fruit. The plants died after two years. Last year I repeated the procedure and only got two plants that produced. The funny thing is they aren't producing berries, they look like small (very smal) jalapenos. They are now producing for the second time and the chilies are over an inch long and extremely hot. The only seeds I planted were from the tepins.....strange.