[jambop]

Hi All
Question about chilli and sweet pepper crossing. I have grown a sweet pepper cornou de boeuf right next to my Jalapenos and am saving the seeds of some in the hope that I will get a great big meaty hot chilli... any chance of it happening?

[surbie100]

Worth a try I'd think. You'll have to grow a fair number of the next generation to see which plants have the attributes you want.

[jambop]

Yes I was thinking I would need to grow quite a few but I have a fair bit of space so I will give it a try. The good thing is that the original pepper is a good fruit although an F1 if it grows anything like the parent it will do even if there is no heat. As a follow on from that I grew row of sweet peppers from seed I saved from a shop bought pepper, which I assume would have been F1. The result was fantastic with peppers better than any others in the garden wonderful vigorous plants and no failures... is F1 really the standard?

[surbie100]

Am not sure what you mean - I thought both were open pollinated? As for the supermarket pepper, if it was an F1 the selection to get an F1 might be for any of many attributes - fast cropping, size, flavour, disease resistance, cropping all at the same time etc.  F1 is not necessarily the standard, but having said that, some F1s breed truer to type than others. There are various threads online about successful Sungold iterations for example.

I had a miserable harvest from my Chenzo F2s so I don't really bother with that anymore. Out of 15 plants I had one that was sufficiently true to type. The rest were rubbish.

I'd still like to try my hand at plant breeding sometime though.