There are quick ripening red varieties like King Arthur ( use to be Fat'N Sassy) Ace, Bell Boy, Lady Bell, Merlin, La Bamba, Redknight. Still takes patience tho and temps in the 80's. At cool temps 50's- 60's none of them will ripen. Like tomatoes there are green when ripe varieties. Not popular tho. some varieties are yellow or orange when ripe.

What do you mean by "started to turn purple?" Some peppers develop purple coloration on the portion that's exposed to extra bright light even while the rest of the pepper will be its normal color. That sort of purple, sometimes black or nearly so, would be normal.

Definitely enjoying growing peppers. Besides my mesclun lettuce mix in early summer, they've been the only crop to survive the record rainfall here (we surpassed our 2012 TOTAL by early July this year) as well as the deer apocalypse that occurred before I got a fence up. Sadly because of the excess rain all of my "hot" peppers might as well be bell peppers. I had to stay lame and go with what I could get my hands on at Lowe's this year as we moved into our home May 1 and I had my garden built and planted within 10 days. Ended up with several color bells, hot banana, hot cherry, jalapeños and habañeros. The habs are nice and hot and taste delicious- just sample my first one today. The others are so mild it's sad! Next season I plan on getting my seeds from Ed Currie of Puckerbutt (of Carolina Reaper fame). He's about 1/2 mile down the road from me and besides the Carolina Reaper he has engineered several varieties to perform well in our specific microclimate of little Fort Mill, SC. Looking forward to growing some crazy things next year with hopefully less rain!!

"if I send you a little shovel think you can "rustle" me up some rhizomes?" For a little shovel like I hear Jolana keeps in her purse I would do about anything! We could have used something when we were scratching around in the dirt with our fingernails trying to find seeds to Black brush Acacia at ARE. It had such pretty thick, almost curly dense foliage, it didn't even look like an acacia. We found four seeds. "And, hey, if worse comes to worse, I'll promise to bail you and your cohorts out." You got a deal! But since I didn't have that 'said' shovel I was reduced to searching for ripe seeds of which I found plenty. Someone on here told me they will bloom their first season (not like Jim's amarilis that took three years) and they were right. So I'm eager to see what these seeds produce when I plant them in the spring. Pink sunburst were the only variety in the group so they won't be mixed. Shirley, the foliage on Tropicana is wonderful. You need both. Here is a link that might be useful: Black brush acacia