Bump. I still have not been able to locate sweet meat squash or hybrid brussel sprouts in trade. I don't want to have to place another seed order.

I've got little peppers on my KOTN - about as big as a thimble. Last year they were late too (and this year I planted later). I spaced about 24" last year, this year the bells were a little closer, about 18", I had to squeeze them in the half row left after planting tomatoes. Soil N tested OK, and the tomatoes did well (but my "early" varieties were late as well), but I think the decomposed bark mulch base mixed with compost on top near the house grew the plants better last year than the sandy loam with coffee hulls, wood shavings, and manure this year. Or maybe it was b/c we had more rain last year, and the 1 month we didn't I had drip. Anyway, I'm going to be amending that bed with more manure for next year. Coffee hulls were an experiment this year - don't seem to work well for anything except compost activator.

Hi everyone! I'm looking for any and all hot peppers to grow. I'm not being picky as I just started on my hot pepper obsession. I have a few things to trade (please see my trade list) but they wont be 100's of seeds in the trade. Please let me know how many seeds you would like and/or ask and I'll let you know how many I have. Since I'm new to this I wanted to make sure I had no hybrids from the 2013 season and didn't keep any of the seeds that even might be suspect. Thanks for looking! Genie

Thanks for the link. Ok so the F1 generation is 100% hybrid and 1 out of 4 of the F2 generation reverts back to the characteristics of the F0 generation? In the comming gerations are the offspring either Hybrid (the same as F1 generation), the same as F0 gereneation, OR do they vary and have some characteristics of both and keep changing? (to rephrase, are there only 3 outcomes; parant A, B, or hybrid C; or could there be several diffent outcomes that are different than the parents) This totally depends on the genetics of the original F0 pair. Dominance/recessivity of the genes that they pass along AND in what combination the F1 generation inherit will determine which characteristics get displayed. I'm not sure how it works between different species (especially with fecundity and whatnot), but if you're hybridizing different cultivars in the same species then things should work mostly by Mendelian rules. The probability that you will end up with F2 and beyond exactly like the F0 or F1 is fairly low, especially if the F0 are very different from one another. There is a point where gene combinations tend to plateau and stabilize, but this takes many generations. The short answer is that depending on the cards that are dealt out, the F2 and beyond can either begin to look like the F0, they can look like the F1, or they can make something totally different. As shelbyguy pointed out, you need to breed on a fairly large scale in order to isolate any traits-- and I am talking about on the order of hundreds to thousands of plants. If you're just doing this for fun with a handful of plants, then expect surprises to pop up along the way, but don't expect to be able to consistently produce identical or even similar plants every generation. Of course peppers are very complex, but let's look at one hypothetical gene that has only two alleles for say, pod size, with large being dominant (P) and small being recessive (p). If you cross a plant with large pods with a plant with small pods, you have two possible genotypes for the parents: PP x pp (both homozygous) Pp x pp (one heterozygous for large pods, the other is homozygous) So already you have two paths that your whole F1 brood can take. Let's look at the first one and see where this takes us. PP x pp = 100% Pp offspring This means that all F1 will have Pp and thus will all have large pods. If we cross the F1, we will get this: Pp x Pp = 25% PP; 50% Pp; 25% pp So 75% of your F2 will have large peppers and 25% will have small ones. To further complicate things, we can cross the F2 and get these: PP x PP = 100% PP PP x Pp = 50% PP; 50% Pp Pp x Pp = 25% PP; 50% Pp; 25% pp Pp x pp = 50% Pp; 50% pp pp x pp = 100% pp Do the math and you have quite a bit of variety amongst your new peppers. Taking a step back, if you backcross the F1 with the F0 parents, you get this: Pp x PP = 50% PP; 50% Pp = 100% large pods Pp x pp = 50% Pp; 50% pp = 50% large, 50% small Let's go back to the second F0 scenario. Pp x pp = 50% Pp; 50% pp = 50% large, 50% small So already the F1 has variety. You have three possible crosses when making the F2: Pp x Pp = 25% PP; 50% Pp; 25% pp Pp x pp = 50% Pp; 50% pp pp x pp = 100% pp And this is just one hypothetical gene with two alleles following simple dominant/recessive rules. There are numerous genes that control size, shape, color, seed number, leaf formation, capsacin content, and there are probably many that have multiple alleles and incomplete/codominance. And then there are genes that work together and affect each other, totally messing up basic Mendelian probabilities. The more you increase the number of genes that you are looking at, you increase the amount of possibilities by orders of magnitude. I'm sure that this didn't exactly answer your question, but I hope that the short 1-gene example helped a little bit? I could make up some 2 or more gene examples to show you how incredibly complex the ratios get when you add more genes in, and how much variation you can get just from two plants.