I usually plant out about 40 sweet pepper plants every year. I do not discriminate against hybrid peppers, as I do not try to save pepper seed. Peppers are usually insect pollinated, unlike tomatoes, and getting pure seed would be almost impossible in an average sized garden. Open pollinated varieties I listed below are marked OP. I plant a varying selection, because the providers switch varieties every year, dropping old ones, introducing new ones. This year, I started a larger than usual number of different varieties, only because I was almost out of some varieties and had to replace them with a different variety. This year, I have started: Brigadier (green>red), Early Sunsation (green>yellow), Gold Standard (green>yellow), Golden Calwonder (green>yellow), Jupitor (green>red, OP), Purple Beauty (purple>red, OP, but I always harvest it before it turns red), Queen Hybrid (green>orange), Sweet Chocolate, OP, Brown (very sweet, but ugly. Looks like something a dog left in your lawn), and Lilac (lilac>red, but I always harvest it before it turns red).

keep 'em warm, read them stories, and so on Little more complicated than that but the FAQs here cover all the basics. And please take them out of the rice now. However you do need to know that they are hybrid varieties so what you get from the seeds, if they grow (many are sterile) will most likely not be the same. Hybrids often revert to parent stock. So do some research into the differences between hybrids and open-pollinated varieties when it comes to growing from seed and then decide if it is worth spending the time on them. Dave Here is a link that might be useful: Saving seeds from hybrids

Because they are delicate and thin walled, normal BWB canning with turn them to mush. I can the salad bar type pepperoncini peppers which are also very thin walled, and I use a no heat vacuum process instead. I pierce each pepper first so each gest full strength vinegar inside. Its veen very successful for me, but would require vacuum tight vessles, a good quality vacuum pump with moisture trap, as well as the Food Saver adapter that can attach to the top of canning jars (with a lid in place). My peppers from 2 years ago are just as crisp as if they were made weeks ago. They have the same texture as the ones you buy in stores.

Quite seriously...at this point I'm pretty sure one of the parents of the hybrid line shows CMS-restorer deficiency (long story short, male sterility) from the male pollen donor and the female never produced much seed to begin with...along with environmental conditions helping the plant along. You don't see this kind of "picky" breeding too much in peppers, though it is a time saver for breeding if you can actually isolate a stable AND (big "and") productive male lacking strong CMS-restoring genetics. This is best educated guess I can come up with, but it could be way off.