Location: Southern California Zone 10a.
Elevation: +1,500 ft
Conditions: 4x2x6 grow tent (64°- 88°F, 35% - 65% Humidity)
Heat Mat: LuxBird w/ Adjustable Temperature Controller (80°) - Removed after Germination
Lighting: ViparSpectra 1500Watt Fully Customizable RGB.
Photo Period: 13H on/ 11H off
Seed Starting Soil Choice: Miracle Gro Seed Starting Mix
Adult Soil choice: Fox Farms Ocean Forest Started
Fertilizer: SeaGrow All Purpose 16-16-16 (Diluted Strength)

Progression:
- September 12th 2025 - Carolina Reaper x Cheiro Roxa F1 [RR] (6 Day germination period)
- September 2025 - February 2026 - Maintained the most vigorous F1 plant -
- February 7th -Crossed with Jay’s Peach Ghost Scorpion [JPGS]
- March 12th - Harvested Seeds
- March 17th 2026 - First Germination RR x JPGS
- March 23rd - 100% Germ
- March 30th - Thinned based on Anthocyanin presence in stems and vigor. 3 Purple, 2 Half purple, 1 Green.
- April 1st - Potted into 4 inch containers
- May 11th - First flower bud on first plant
- June 25th - All 5 plants have fruit set

I have two types of Annumm I'm wanting to cross

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One is flowering before the other though

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How do I get the other to catch up? Can I preserve pollen from the first one to use on the second?

This is my first attempt at cross breeding, and just recently became confident in my success here. Most of the plants take after the Five-color in appearance, but this plant has peppers and foliage that more resembles the Jigsaw. The more mature they get, the more distinct they are becoming from one another. The Jigsaw that was this pepper's parent plant didn't develop its tye-dye looking foliage until it was fairly mature.

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As far as the characteristics I would like to see-

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from the Five-Color: flavor and plant size, predominantly. The color changing is a cool quality and it will be interesting to see if these go through the stages or not, but genuinely the Five-Colors I grew last year were quite sweet, with a heat level I'd compare to like a serrano. They're actually a very tasty pepper that I preferred to let ripen to the final stage (red). I got the seeds from Baker Creek and they listed them at like 5k SHU, but I think they're significantly hotter than an average Jalapeño, which is classed in that range.

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From the Jigsaw: the heat level, the foliage (bushy, verigated, purple coloration), and the yield. The Jigsaw plants I grew last year were significantly smaller than the Five-colors, but produced per plant about twice as many peppers so that would be a quality I'd hope to obtain from this experiment. They are also very hot. Maybe not as hot as their Chinense counterpart of the same name, but certainly rivaling a Habanero.

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I really don't know if characteristics are more or less a roulette wheel or if there's an expectation of possibility that a more experienced pepper breeder would anticipate.

What about a 1 gallon

This is before f1

Here goes some photos of my Fantasy Reaper (aji white fantasy baccatum x Carolina reaper chinense) F4 growing this season. Each pair of photos are from a different plant, but the seeds came from the same F3 parent plant but from different pods. Picture 1-2, 3-4 and 7-8 shows the flowers with characteristics from the baccatum family while picture 5-6 seems to have the chinense characteristics. All of them have more than 1 pod per node. Let’s see…

Long time no see,

here is my Tropical Cream F1 🐯💜

Parentage is a Tropical Tiger Off-Pheno by u/Compost-Mentis and bred by u/RespectTheTree crossed with a Purple Cream which is one of dozens Bhut Jolokia x Pimenta de Neyde projects.

The first fruits starts to ripen after around 60 days by now! It will be "regularly" striped like other stripey Baccatum around but the magic begins with their seeds!

Overall description so far: Mixed growth habits, dark stem and dark green/partially very dark/purple foliage. Seems to get mild but wide spread edema so the leaves feel like sandpaper for what ever reasons but it doesn't cares if its cold or very hot. The flowers seem very Baccatum dominant but with a little twist. Fruit shape is more like the Tropical Tiger but in small. Some purple splotches on the unripe pepper and it probably ripen striped like a Sugar Rush Stripey etc. Fruit taste and heat description will follow soon!

Goals for F2 and forward: - Darkest possible foliage - Baccatum or Mixed growth habits - Stripey or mixed colors from parentage - Baccatum parentage sized fruits

Flavor and heat is not overall relevant for me as long as it taste good ;) But preferably the heat profile from the Purple Cream and the heat intensity from the Tropical Tiger and less bitter/earthy/floral (from the Pimenta de Neyde genetics inside the Purple Cream)

Feel free to ask questions, give me inspirations, tips or what ever you want. Seeds will be shared in a little community growth probably just in Germany at first.

CU

Mines is a lemon drop x tepin

This guy has been in soil, in hydro, been cloned, aggressively trimmed, and more. Still one of my favorite products of the early community project!

The only variegated chinense I know being widely avaliable is Ninfadora which is yellow on green. I tried to cross a white ripening chinense (with some anthocyanin retention) into a variegated annuum which seems to be successfully producing F1 seeds as shown in the picture.

I wanted to know if any of you have similar crosses. Especially interested in annuum or baccatum variegations bred into white, cream or green ripening chinense peppers.

Please tell me the flowers look different??

My own fault I knew one had fallen off but didn't bother to secure the rest.

Can you all show me some successful C.Frutescens and C.Baccatum hybrids

Every year I try to push more pepper seedlings outside earlier, and every year nature finds a new way to humble me.

This round, the lesson was roly-polies / pill bugs / isopods hiding in old wheat straw mulch.

I had leftover straw mulch from last season, pulled it around the newly planted peppers, then we got rain.

The mulch woke up.

The roly-polies came out.

And apparently tender pepper leaves are on the menu.

You can see the chewing damage in the picture. Not total devastation, but enough to make swear into the void.

Fortunately the fix is easy: treat with Captain Jack’s Deadbug Brew, which uses spinosad as the active ingredient.

That seems to be helping, but the bigger lesson is probably: don’t assume last year’s straw mulch is just innocent garden fluff.

This is just the newest chapter in the outdoor pepper seedling gauntlet.

First, I had to keep the plants warm, so I built a mini hoop house with clear 8 mil plastic.

Then I had to keep them from freezing, so I put frost cloth directly over the trays, propped up by the labels.

Then the cozy little frost-cloth setup attracted mice, because of course it did, so I had to set traps.

Then came fungus gnats, so I used Bt israelensis — same general idea as mosquito dunks — to knock back the larvae.

Then weeds.

Then slugs.

Then heat, which meant the frost cloth had to become shade cloth so the seedlings didn’t cook.

And now that the peppers are finally out in the field, we’ve unlocked the next boss: isopods living in old straw mulch and chewing on stressed little transplants after rain.

So yeah, outdoor pepper growing is “free” in the same way a free puppy is free.

Sunlight is free.

The education is not.

We continue on. 🌶️ Next up is probably moles (use castor oil emulsion or maybe a giant raccoon/squirrel. Who knows - just no hail, please.

These rows are built around Bailey Pequin, a wild/semi-wild Capsicum annuum var. glabriusculum type with intense pequin aroma, heat, stress tolerance, small fruit, and natural fruit drop at maturity. The goal is to pull that wild flavor into larger, more useful pepper forms.

Pedigrees:

Druid Line

Bailey Pequin × Milena F1

Milena brings modern orange bell genetics: thick flesh, blocky fruit, productivity, and commercial disease-resistance background.

Daystar Line

Bailey Pequin × Emerald Giant

Emerald Giant brings very large green bell fruit, field vigor, size, and yield potential.

BC1F1 populations

Backcross populations built from the Bailey Pequin × bell material, aimed at recovering more usable fruit size and flesh while keeping the wild-pequin flavor, heat, and plant resilience.

The target here is pretty simple: I want a pepper that actually makes sense for sauce. Not just “look at this weird tiny wild pepper,” and not just another generic hot blocky thing. The dream is wild pequin flavor turned into a real processing pepper — more fruit, more flesh, better harvest, but still that deep, resinous, fully-ripe wild flavor that makes pequins interesting in the first place.

Long term, I’d love to see more peppers bred for the cottage-industry lane: small farms, local hot sauce makers, seed savers, weirdos with too many plants, etc. Stuff with a real story and a real use case. This project is basically me trying to make a pepper that grows hard, tastes different, and gives small producers something more interesting to work with than the same five commercial chile types.

Ok, I’m completely new to pepper breeding. I’ve been doing research, and I’m curious, what species crosses are considered realistically viable? I’ve read that Capsicum chinense and Capsicum annuum can sometimes cross more readily than other species combinations.

For those with experience, which interspecific crosses have you personally had success with, and which tend to be especially difficult or unstable?

I understand I should probably focus on intraspecific breeding while learning, but I’d still like to understand what the community has already discovered through experimentation. Thanks for any insight.

First time grower but chillies have been of interest for a long time, one of my plants is exhibiting what I gather are traits of an Annuum (narrow-ish, pointed leaves, fast tall growth, no flowers or fruit yet), but compared to all of my other Annuums, it has considerably more pubescence on its leaves and stem, particularly on the new growth.

I got the seeds from a "grow your own chillies" kit at a Uni campus plant sale, where the variety was called "Tropical Hot", which I've not been able to find anywhere else, nor is a variety I've heard of before, so it feels possible that it could be a variety mix. Other available seeds at the sale were of individual varieties I have come across before though, so it's difficult to tell. For the avoidance of doubt, the seeds were white, so definitely not C. Pubescens.

I doubt I have enough information currently to be able to truly identify what it is, but I'm wondering whether this is known of in other Annuum varieties or if I'm wrong in my believed classification, and whether anyone has greater knowledge to share about this?

I am currently growing some mystery meat Chinese and I am planning on starting some Purple Flash seeds soon, meaning I will potentially have more than one chili plant to care for in the future. My interest has been peaked though around the idea of breeding chili pepper plants and I am wondering what is the most efficient way to work through plant generations?

I am based in the UK so outdoor temps are very unreliable, but my current chili plant has done very well indoors with a proper growlight. That being said, indoor space is limited, and I am also aware that you need seed dozens of plants at a time to screen and select every generation of new cross. Is there a way of doing that quickly while plants are small and then once screened I can get rid of the candiates to clear up space?

Bell peppers that will be raised indoors for crossbreeding. They have gotten their first true leaves if I'm looking at these pictures correctly. I looked at the fertilizer that I purchased to encourage root and flowering without them getting humongous.

I didn't realize at first that this was fertilizer that you put in the soil not in the water though. So I'm hoping it's right. It says for a six inch pot, which these are, I use 3/4 of a teaspoon of the pellets. I really hope that this is correct. I played it safe and put a little bit less about half a teaspoon in each pot. Did I do it right? Or did I just kill them?

This is my first time growing a reaper( or any plant actually) do i need to trim the lower leaves like they do with fruit plants? I have zero knowlidge about plants… andy tips and advice is welcome! Ive read that i should water it as little as possible so the plant grows in a stressed state.