Here's how the same plant looked Feb 11 of this year:

Looks a helluva lot better than my frozen outside plants on 2/11. You must be in Aridzona or some other hell-hole...

I'm in coastal Los Angeles, just a couple of miles from the ocean - far enough from any hell-hole. If it happens to get hot (like over 80 degrees), I can go to the beach, but I do have central A/C. In the last 2-3 weeks it has been getting to the mid 80s, but that was pretty rare, until the last couple of years. Last January was exceptionally warm, however. I grew up in Texas, and we have nothing here like the heat I endured there.

I thought about moving to Cali, but I can handle the heat better than quakes and tsunamis. I saw the movie... ;-)

I lived in a tsunami zone for 15 years when I was in Venice, but the largest tsunami we ever had was only about 1 foot high. The evacuation routes were well marked, however. Earthquakes are a different story, but the largest one I was in was in Mexico City. Northridge was scary and we were without water, power, and gas for two to three days, but I'm in a better neighborhood now - more stable ground. I was in Culver City in 1994, and I got a lot of damage from the quake, but that was just two weeks before I was moving to Venice, and fortunately I had already reserved a truck before the quake for that move. I got out of Culver City in the nick of time. The house that I moved to in Venice had no damage, but the apartment in CC was pretty bad.

Here's the same Habanero plant from June 11, 2015:

I'll have to take some new photos of the volunteer plant - it is starting to make chilies now, and they look like Cayenne instead of Habanero. I had a Cayenne plant about five feet away, and so I'm not sure how Cayenne seeds would have gotten into that pot, unless birds dropped them there.

Could the new plant possibly be a hybrid between Habanero and Cayenne? So far, the chilies are still green and not very large, but the plants is quite a bit more prolific than the Cayenne was - it is producing quantities more similar to the Habanero.

I was hoping for another Habanero - I find the Cayenne a bit more difficult to use in cooking, although they dry nicely.

Another thing I noticed is that the new plant is growing very vertically, and the Habanero plants grow more horizontally (at least for me).

Looks like the parent plant got root bound. The new plant still has room to go. I would at some point raise the root ball out, wash it till it was mostly roots, then replant with some fresh mix. For me it bought me another two months, which I got tonw of pods from the plant before frost hit.

I do plan to take the plant out and add soil to the bottom. We just got new gutters this week and have had to move a lot of plants around for that and still have not yet moved them back.

BTW, I was born in Temple, Texas and graduated from Temple High School in 1968. After graduating from Rice U, I moved to California, however. I used to take the Santa Fe train between Temple and Houston when in college. I was not happy when Amtrak took over, although I don't remember exactly when that was.

We don't have frost where I live in Los Angeles (near the beach), and so I get chilies all winter. I have terrible soil, however, which is why I keep a lot of plants in pots, but that also makes it easier to pick the chilies, and I can keep them closer to the kitchen.

You can see the new gutter drain we got Wednesday, and I still have plants to move back.