Chilli plant breeding

If there are any readers of this blog, apologies for not writing anything about my plants for a while. The tayberries were a success, and I had 2 and a bit jars of jam made which has almost all gone now unfortunately. If I get time I will write a bit about the stem cuttings I have made at some point.

Meanwhile my chilli plants have grown, and now some of them have been upgraded to larger pots.

I'll show three of my plants in more detail, these were all from seeds I collected from plants I grew last year, which came from a mixed pack of chilli seeds I bought in Mallets (also supplier of the Perak planters above which were on special offer).

In the mixed seed pack, I had four varieties but wasn't sure exactly what they were. As far as I can tell they were:

• Some kind of habenero, the fruits I harvested last year had no seeds in, but I did overwinter some of these successfully and they seem to be fruiting better this year.
• A jalapeno that ripened to dark green, which I didn't plant any seeds from, and none of which survived the winter.
• A chilli plant that was quite large that produced fruits similar to the one in the middle above, green and eventually ripening to red. These plants all died over winter, but I had seeds from them, including the plant in the middle here. It looks similar to Anaheim.
• A plant that had smaller green pods that ripened to yellow. I think this was probably either Golden Cayenne or Aji Limon. I overwintered one of these plants, and also collected seeds from some of them, although I only have 2 plants (including the one on the right) that were from seeds that didn't get mixed with the larger red chillis.

This plant, 18119 is an offspring of 1701, which has similar looking leaves, and fruits that start green and turn yellow.

This plant, 18187 is from seeds  from 1708 (similar to 1701) and 1715 (the large red Anaheim? chillis) which got mixed together before planting. The appearance of the plant is more like 1715.

This is 18157, which has long thin leaves quite reminiscent of 1701, but fruits that ripen to red. However they first turn yellow, which the Anaheim-type one didn't, they went straight from green to red.

 It is interesting that 18157 seems to show a mixture of characteristics of the yellow and the red chillis, so I wonder if this is cross-pollinated between the yellow and red chillis.