Edy: I did the exact same thing with all three colors. But I didnt harvest any until well after I had already started my seedlings for the year so I didn't plant any. I probably should have just to see like you did even if they didn't produce much.

But it looks like you are a long way from a mini-bell there. I hope mine turn out closer. I will probably give them a shot next year.
Bruce

ha ha ha, I did the same thing except used I think sunsweet brand or something like that. They were red and yellow and sweet. The hardest thing was most pods had zero seeds and the ones that did were maybe between 1 to 4 seeds. I somehow got two to germinate into pepper producing plants.

Your results are more drastic, so far I have about the same general shape but they seem to be a bit larger than the ones in the package I bought.

Mark

I planted seeds from peppers that looked like these from a store bought veggie tray from last year. Interesting enough I have both red and orange ones that look and taste like the originals. Three plants with the orange and two with the red.

Still not much to see, but they're all capping out at the same size.

I wonder what they have in their heritage that is making them this long?

Looks like there might be some "Jimmy Nardello" genetics in that plant line's breeding lineage.

Hmmm... I concur.

Could it be as simple as crossing a nardello with a bell to get the original hybrids?

Any time I get a pepper (even a common anaheim type) that has an aspect that's unique (usually taste/flavor) I save the seed and grow it out to see what's going on.

A lot of the time I don't get anything worth keeping. The biggest issue is production. A lot of these "custom" (small company created/distributed) hybrid peppers are designed for field growth that doesn't require much (if any) staking. I have a small garden so I like my plants to both tower and produce. The small + productive traits seem to be hard to stabilize open pollinated.

When I do things like this I sometimes make intentional hybrid crosses between whatever I have growing that's interesting. Most of these become "trash plants" who's seed isn't worth saving, but I've picked up a couple of interesting projects/results out of it.

I have my own (stabilized open pollinated from hybridization) small/super-sweet pepper I worked on for years called Crunch Sweet Orange that was created from a friend's Romanian Sweet pepper and a supermarket-seed-saved pepper that I was growing out. It's a large plant with vigorous production of 3"-ish sweet orange peppers. It's similar to "Yummy" but it's much larger, more productive, has slightly different "fruity" flavors underneath the "sweet," and it produces slightly bigger peppers. It's not a great comparison because "Yummy" was bred to be a compact plant, but the end result is small super-sweet orange peppers. I'm currently working on a Anaheim x Cubanelle cross between my two favorite collected seed lines of both. It'll be a few more years...this project is more slow-going.

Sometimes when you grow out a F1 it looks exactly the same...produces the same. Sometimes you get "Woah, what's this?" There's always hybrid-given traits you can't see that might not be present...such as disease resistance or drought tolerance.

For the record, these pods are getting huge. Seriously, even my banana peppers weren't this big (about as long, but not as girthy). These things are almost big enough to club someone with.

Wow, those are some hefty pods!

You're not kidding - you could club someone with those! Looks great!

Took the measuring tape to it. That pod is officially just under 8" long and right at 4" in circumference at the base. Thats 4x longer than the pod the seed came from.

Greatly looking forward to seeing what color it turns and what it tastes like.

Edy: Very cool! Almost looks like a numex type. Cool experiment. I'm very interested to see how these things turn out.

nc-crn: email me about a trade, I'd love to get some Crunch sweet orange going in NJ.

The big one is starting to change color.

Can't tell yet if its going to be orange or red, but I'm pretty sure I planted it from a yellow or orange seed, so no telling what it'll be.

That looks like an Anaheim. Betcha it turns red. If so, between your numex halloweens and this, you've got some crazy stuff going on Edymnion.

Kevin

Got some ripe ones for a final verdict.

Size is obvious, flavor is definitely sweet and mild, oddly lacking in the normal "pepper" flavor you get even with bells. About the same flavor as the little ones, which is good.

Seed placement seems erratic.

Overall pretty good though.

Wow Edy, those are cool pods. Do you plan to save seeds from the franken-chile and grow again?

I'll save some seeds, don't know if I'll grow them again next year though. While interesting, they're not really that high up on my priority list. Only grew these out because I had an empty pot and leftover dirt laying around.

LoL.... I'm so glad you all have already been working on this. I'm wanting to know this too & you have just saved me a season of waiting! My first thought was pimentos, although I have never actually tasted a fresh pimento; but am growing some this year to see if they taste similar. These are really great tasting.

my buddy had some of these peppers in his fridge going bad he gave me 1 of each color Red yellow & Orange i dried them about 48 hrs and dropped them into some soil had some good results on germination so i have approx 20 or so plants going i will try to post some pics when the pods start forming .

my tabasco plants came from seeds that were in store bought tabasco peppers. I thought the reason why my plant is only 10" tall but wide as heck was because it was badly stunted. now I've got peppers turning red when they're tiny compared to a 'proper' tabasco (literally half the size), and hotter than a normal tabasco should be.

I'm starting to wonder if I have some sort of weird hybrid going on too. if so, cool. I wasn't planning on keeping seeds for next year anyway, but now I might just to see what happens. if the new plant comes up short and stumpy despite proper care, I'll know I've got something weird going on.