my favriote cross was a few years back. i did purple cayanne
and dragons claw long ugly purple peppers.

You can probably find Dave DeWitt's :The Pepper Garden" at your library

Thanks fiedlemeister... looks like a valuable reference!
I just looked it up @ AMAZON.COM :)

I will have to make my way to the library this weekend!

Well, my local library doesnt carry the book...

I'll throw out some questions, maybe you good folk know the answers!

So I cross 2 peppers and (i think) you get an F1 pepper after I plant the seeds. What happens if I plant the seeds FROM that F1 pepper?

and...

How do you get from F1 to F2?

What happens if you plant the seeds from an F2 pepper?

At the risk of misinforming you (which I hope that I'm not-- someone will surely correct me if I am), I'll add that the F2 generation is the offspring of the F1 generation, whether from a single self-pollinated plant or two F1 plants.

In genetics terms, the F0 generation refers to the first pair, the offspring of which is the F1 generation. An offspring of the F1, whether self-pollinated or crossed with another from the same F1 population, is F2. Cross the F2 with another F2 or let it self-pollinate and you get F3, and so on.

Ok, well I guess my question is:

If I make a hybrid, will IT'S seeds make the same hybrid plant? Or will it revert to one of the parent plants?

What is it meant by stabalizing it?

You might want to brush up on the basics of genetics, as there are some hard and fast rules that pretty much every organism follows. I don't know how hardcore some of you pepper people are, but I know that at the very least a cursory understanding of the terminology and mechanisms would really help you. Your questions seem to be very similar to those that Gregor Mendel had when he went into his pea plant experiments :3

Addressing your specific question: If both parents in the F0 are different from each other, then there is no way for any of the offspring to "revert" to be like a parents in the previous generation since all subsequent generations will carry genes from both parents in the original pair. However, depending on the the genes that are passed down, you may end up with an F2 that more closely resembles one of the F0 parents than the F1 just because of the lottery draw that determines the gene combinations.

I'm going to hazard a guess that "stabilizing" means to create a plant that will breed true, but again, that's just a guess.

I wish I had more to offer, but someone will come around with specific pepper-related answers :3

I still need answers my smart gardenweb-friends!

This link has some good info on Mendel's experiments:

http://anthro.palomar.edu/mendel/mendel_1.htm

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)

Another question.

How do you get to the point where you have a stable hybrid then? by inbreeding the successive generations with the desired characteristic repeatedly? How many generations?

you realize that with each subsequent generation, your choice of available phenotypes goes up exponentially, right?

and while crossing back to the original parents will help dehybridize the genetic line, it also has an exponential increase in chances for undesirable, recessive traits to come out.

if you want to isolate for a given trait past f3, you're talking HUNDREDS of plants. and you still have to know what you're looking for in order to pick the right plants.

the only way to judge the combining ability of two parent plants is to judge the progeny.

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.