debwhite0215- Are you talking about simply having your plants get pollinated or are you trying to prevent cross pollination? These are two very different things. Cross pollination is when two varieties of the same type of plants pollinate each other. Like if one variety of eggplant pollinated a different variety of eggplant, that would be cross pollination. If you saved the seeds from a cross and planted them you wouldn't know what to expect from the resulting plants. If you are just talking about making sure your plants get pollinated, most veggies are self pollinating but obviously it's always better to plant more than one. Not only for pollination reasons but also because you just aren't going to get much from only one plant (tomatoes and zucchini being exceptions). little_minnie- The misinformation in gardening does bug me a bit. There is a ton of very persistent misinformation that surrounds heirloom, open pollinated, hybrid, and GMO seeds. Everybody wants heirloom, non-hybrid, and non-GMO seeds (not that home gardeners can get GMO seeds) because they want to save their own seeds. And I'm always telling people they don't have to stick with just heirlooms, they can save open pollinated seeds as well and that if they don't prevent cross pollination it won't matter if something is non-hybrid because they'll end up with hybrids in the end. Needless to say, that farmer saying that hybrids are sterile and not able to cross with heirlooms would have frustrated the hell out of me if I saw it. :) A little off-topic but still somewhat relevant. Rodney

most pepper species cross prolifically with each other. Unless you're talking indoors where there is no wind, no bees, and they are perhaps far enough apart that pollen won't travel from one to the other, then cross-pollination is a very real possibility. Oh, and plants don't care what their name is :) they just want to reproduce.

I started here: http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/haworth/jns/2005/00000006/F0020002/art00004;jsessionid=4d22me6ilr4c2.alexandra Went to here: http://www.ingentaconnect.com/search;jsessionid=1dtwat2pfyl2p.alexandra?database=1&title=hybrid%20seed%20production Came across this: http://books.google.com/books?id=f7djBk80Z6oC There are names of books and authors if you want to see if a library has them.Some Universities have online libraries too. I think the book was $60.00.OUCH The previews(what I'm reading now) have some interesting stuff in them. Some of the reference material at the end of the preview might be found on the net and a library might subscribe to the company that has the book online as a pdf.A lot of times these kind of research people donate subscriptions to libraries and universities. I'll probably find some more stuff.Going to try Dept. of agriculture see if the chile institute will answer an E-Mail about help in finding info on hybrids that doesn't take a brainiac to understand. By what little there is that I've read so far, I think all seeds in a pod will be the same. It seems I read that somewhere in my search but I don't remember if it was because they controlled the fertilization process or the plants genetics or something. I know with corn that you can have different kernals of several kinds of corn on one ear.Each piece of cornsilk only pollinates a couple seeds. One way of producing a hybrid pepperr for commercial seed production is to make a pepper plant that all males are sterile and also make another plant that all the females are sterile. Plant them together to produce your hybrid. Only males of plant A are fertile/Viable whatever. Only females of plant B are fertile. I'm assuming they use sterile females and males so they know which plant will produce the seeds and what the seeds will grow.. Lets say if plant A was to Pollinate plant B you create plant C. But if Plant B pollinated A you would get Plant D not C. A and B would be hybrids of whatever your crosses needed to be to make the plant you want to end up with...Hybridised to make sterile females or males depending on what you need to produce your end resulting Hybrid. That would somewhat explain why some hybrids are stable-produce seed true to the parent-like Black Pearl. It's a stable Hybrid. There is more to it I'm sure,like possibly having to go through generations of inbreading before you get a stable hybrid or whatever else you have to do that might be species specific or have something to do with stuff I don't know about. I think I read on a forum somewhere that a guy had some Cayene pods from a plant that the seeds grew into many variations of the original plant.But that still doesn't tell you if just different pods got pollinated by different plants or if one pod could be producing several crosses of seeds by itself. Google time I guess.

I crossed a Bhut and a white bullet habanero, the outcome peppers look like a Serrano, as well as have thicker walls a Hab trait over the thin Bhut walls. The heat is hot but nothing like a ghost. I don't care for the Hab flavor but the cross taste good and seems to not have taken on the Hab flavor. The skin is smooth and did not get the bumpy traits of the Bhut. So it's hit or miss with what traits come across. With this cross I would say the white bullet Hab dominated in all areas except for flavor.