Mysterious Hot Pepper

[Dave2000]

No idea what to name it. So far I've been calling them my "not Jamaican Chocolate" peppers. Maybe I need to eat a few more before I decide, they were delicious on a pizza last night but I'm a fiend for spicy hot food.

 

[Chickie'sMomaInNH]

have you ever tried to grow the ghost chilli? if you did, did you have any luck with them? i didn't have luck my first time trying to get them to grow. they sprouted and grew a little but i had them in the house and they just couldn't get warm enough to thrive. i need my greenhouse to get them to stay hot enough.

 

[Dave2000]

^ I grew a few Chocolate Jamaicans, a few more hybrid Habaneros and a lot of Savina Habaneros this year among other types, but no ghost chilis. They have similar needs though so I'll detail how I started those. They do seem to need both > 70F day temperature and > 50F night temperature at a minimum for good results.

Some say don't use peat, that it's too acidic. I read that after I had already had success using it so I still do use a largely peat based product, Miracle Grow Seed Starting Potting Mix and I put some regular topsoil at the bottom of the pots to make the Miracle Grow mix go further. In this case it might help that my tap water is slightly alkaline to change ph a little, or it could be that those claiming peat is a problem were doing something else suboptimal.

I only bury the seeds about 3/16" and loosely sprinkle the potting mix over them. I put 3 seeds in each pot about 1/4" apart and later cut away the slowest smallest one then wait a couple weeks to cut away the other runt leaving the biggest sprout. Cover with plastic wrap (in a few days if fungus grows, spray with a 1:10 solution of OTC hydrogen peroxide:water only as needed), place under some grow lights in a homemade structure with cardboard and polycarbonate sides to keep a lot of the heat from the grow lamps inside. That keeps the soil at about 15F above the ambient room temperature of 70F, so they're 85F for 16 hours a day and 70F at night.

After about 2.5 to 4 weeks practically all have sprouted. At that point I had little popsicle sticks in them with markings so I wouldn't lose track of what they were. Use an oil based (usually ballpoint type) pen to make markings on popsicle sticks, once I used magic markers and the water wicked up the popsicle sticks and made the markings completely illegible.

That kept the plastic wrap up high enough to not interfere with their first couple inches of growth. Because I had ample light from the grow lights (about 6 square feet of space per 8 x 18W CFL "daylight" (6500K color temp) bulbs), they don't get very leggy and I can keep the plastic wrap propped up like a tent by the popsicle sticks until nearly all have sprouted.

They'd stayed at about 85F till now on a platform that kept the pots closer to the grow lights. As they got taller I had to get them off the platform, further away from the lights so they were at about 80F the rest of their time inside and then the plastic wrap tent came off so with faster water loss I start watering daily, every two days at most instead of once every 3 days. With those in plastic pots instead of peat or rolled up newspaper they could go even longer than 3 days while the plastic wrap was over them.

That's about it. I put some miracle grow fertilizer in their water once a week and when they were about a month old I pointed a small computer fan sideways blowing not on them but past them, so they wouldn't dry out too fast but were hardened a little to grow thicker stems. This and the aforementioned items worked much better than years ago when I just put them next to a sunny window, though that too worked well enough that I kept at it till I got motivated enough to start monitoring temperature and build a grow light housing.

Some people say you "need" or "must" harden them by taking them outside for a few hours every day before leaving them outside, but I did not do that and saw no ill effects. That could be because I already had a lot of light, heat, and a breeze. I don't mean to imply it is an unnecessary step. I try to time my seeding so they have about 12 weeks from seeding till there's less than 10% chance of frost outside. That way I can move them straight from under the grow lights to outside and it'll stay warm enough for them to survive, at which point the sunlight helps them more than keeping them at higher average temperature inside. With faster sprouting plants, 2 weeks less time is needed. Jalapenos for example I can pull out and put outside leaving more room under the grow lights for the slower sprouting chinense peppers.

There may be ways to improve upon my methods, I'm still learning a lot about the topic myself. I'm thinking about expanding my grow light area this spring so I can start seedlings earlier, by putting some aluminumized plastic reflective emergency blankets over cardboard box panels as cheap DIY faux mirrors to reduce light loss.

Anyway, keeping them at 80F or above and a LOT of light are the two most important things. I'd need a control group and testing to figure out if any of the rest really matters.

 

[HunkieDorie23]

The same thing happened to my brother two years ago. He had two pepper plants he couldn't identify because they weren't what they were supposed to be. He too guessed Tobasco but they weren't quite. I have too mention this too him.

 

[smileyfacecat]

looks a lot like the Candlelight Peppers that I grew last year. They were kinda hot & had a complex spicy after taste, but were still edible (made an excellent addition to a chili);

 

[Dave2000]

looks a lot like the Candlelight Peppers that I grew last year. They were kinda hot & had a complex spicy after taste, but were still edible (made an excellent addition to a chili);

Thanks for the suggestion but I am doubting that's what it is because all the info I could find on Candlelights suggested a short/compact/dense plant around 16" tall, while this plant has (or at least used to) have a very unique tall, tree-like shape. That and a Candlelight seems to be capsicum annuum while this plant seems to be at least half capsicum chinense.

Now that this year's plants are starting to take on recognizable shapes I have a new development. It appears as though I have a new plant that's a cross between this plant and either a red habanero or a chocolate jamaican, and from a chocolate jamaican plant's fruit I have a very similar looking plant that may or may not be a similar cross breed. Now I'm anxious to see what the fruit on these two looks like once it is full sized and ripe, and especially what it tastes like.

 

[Mojave]

Looks like Super Chili, a very common plant in the nurseries every Spring.

 

[Dave2000]

It's not a Super Chili, not annuum, pods don't grow upside down, smaller calyx, and the flash is different besides which the person who sold me the seeds didn't grow anything that looked like that so it has to be a hybrid of something he grew.

It is (was) definitely at least part Chinense. After further consideration my best guess is it was a cross between a Tabasco and a Chocolate Jamaican.

This year I'm growing a couple crosses between that plant and some Chocolate Jamaicans. These crosses are very interesting in that the pods are hotter and larger than both the parent plants' pods.

 

[MontyJ]

Sure looks like serrano tampiqueno to me. They don't get as large as the standard Serrano.

 

[Dave2000]

No type of serrano, among other things mentioned it also has the typical smaller size/structure/color blooms of a chinense, as well as being somewhere in the lower 100's of SHU heat range, a smokier flavor, more waxy pod, etc.