First thing I have to ask, as someone else already has, is…
WHY???Don’t get me wrong, I love chilli, but I like to chop up heaps of fresh chillis into 1cm slices and add handfuls into dishes, such as Thai dishes and my fave… chilli con carne. When eating such dishes, I like to feel a bit of heat, but I don’t wanna end up standing in front of an open fridge alternating between skulling milk and shovelling massive spoonfuls of cold yoghurt into my gob while tears are streaming down my face.
I have no idea about scovells, I rate chillis on a scale of one to ten, with one being like eating a slightly spicy capsicum, to ten being a chilli that gives the above mentioned result… and after handling/preparing inhibits you from being able to safely siphon-the-python for a few hours without wearing welding gauntlets. A ten is a chilli I would never, ever, go near again… and can’t fathom why anyone would... I was once bitten on the hand by a Huntsman spider, it hurt like hell and sent a throbbing, burning sensation up my arm that lasted about an hour… I would never intentionally piss off a Huntsman ever again… so I can’t understand why anyone would intentionally eat a chilli that they know is going to smack them upside the head and make them feel like they’ve just inhaled napalm?
I like to grow chillis that are about a 3/10 on my scale and put plenty of them into each dish I cook… I’m after taste over heat, as well as the nutritional benefits, the vitamin C etc. I have a mate from El Salvador and he puts chilli in just about everything, but mild chillis and lots of them. He’s in his late 50’s and is probably the healthiest guy I know, he doesn’t go out of his way to exercise but he’s in good shape, he reckons as well as providing a boost to the immune system, eating plenty of chilli also boosts the metabolism. He harvests and eats his chilli’s when they are still green but are just starting to turn a bit orange/red, supposedly that’s when they are the most nutrtitious and give the best health benefits.
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Chillys will cross breed like rabbits so keeping plants a long way from each other is about the only way to get true seed
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I once read an article in a magazine, I believe Organic Gardening, where they were talking about pepper seeds coming true. It was stated that they could cross pollinate as far as 40 miles away. Sounded to me like a long way, but, I have never got pepper seeds to come true yet.
I can attest to that (dunno about the 40 miles), I had a great Hungarian Hot wax which bore fat yellow fruit that eventually turn orange and about a 3/10 on my heat scale, as well as a Red Cayenne that was slightly hotter, with long slender bright red fruit to about 15cm in length and about 4/10. I grew them at complete opposite ends of our yard, we're on over 800m so it’s a good sized yard, one was down one side of the house in a patio area, the other was about 30+m away at the farthest end of our veg garden… and they cross pollinated.
I was pissed at first, because I had no more original seed from either and only found out they’d cross pollinated after a whole season had gone by, but the resulting chilli that grew from what was supposed to be the HHW seed… wasn’t that bad!... a fat red chilli about 6-10cm long and about a 3/10… brilliant for cooking. They grew well for a couple of years, but last summer's result was not good, very little heat, a 2/10 at a stretch… so the year before they must’ve crossed pollinated with something one of the neighbours had in their yard.
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No I wouldnt get them from there again, Got some indian ones before and they grew and then I found they were scotch bonnets, wasnt very happy about that. Im not overly sure of how they(the plants) are kept separate to get the correct strains breeding true, Ive been told they dont do that.
After losing my original Hungarian Hot Wax strain, I bought and grew some new HHW plants last summer with seed bought from an online seed company, they were junk!... They didn’t look like the previous HHW I’d had and were like eating a skinny yellow capsicum… no heat at all... I don't know where each individual seed company get their chilli seed from, but I saw one that used to advertise on ebay and showed photo's of their "stock" plants... they had a number of different varieties all in close proximity to each other.
Backyard Aquaponics
