who sold you the peach bhuts with the luscious pods?
Pam

Refining Chile's had the better tasting one. Their yellow Fataliis are better than average as well. The Douglahs that came from their plans are huge compared to the ones I was growing from another source.

A recent poster here made the comment that genotype is not the same as phenotype. Not sure I understand this well at all, but it does seem to bear on the question of why some plants ostensibly with the same genes grow out so different. Can you comment?

Dennis

Well, basically, what you are looking at is your phenotype, but there is a huge amount of genetic diversity hidden in that plant. Among the plants I grow, I have a large collection of Dyckias, which are xeric, terrestrial bromeliads. When you propagate a named variety, it must be from offset. It looks like I need to post twice on these pictures, so here should be the picture of the cultivar Snaggletooth.

Now, I self pollinated this plant about three years ago and this picture is a tray of some of the seedlings. If you can see good enough, there are red ones, silver ones, green ones, and everything in between. This is the diversity hiding in this one plant. Then, in another year, the flowers may vary as well, but these plants are normally sold for the look of the plant itself.
If you isolate your pepper plant and take the seeds from a couple of peppers and make about 100 seedlings you will see a great deal of variation. If you started with something like a yellow fatalii, you won't see that much variation in of shape and taste, but that pepper has been stable for who knows how long. Take a pepper that came from a first generation hybridization, you will see all kinds of variation in pod shape and possibly color, depending on what you were putting together. I would bet that if you took the best looking reapers and mixed them with primos, you wouldn't see a lot of variation with pod shape. But just think, there are genes for everything. All the plant characteristics, pod shape, but also taste, heat, and even what kind of heat. Immediate heat, time release heat, and length of heat. To get exactly what you want, you take the best plants and make another generation, where you take that best plant and self it again. Sooner or later, the variations will be less obvious, and that is how you make a stable hybrid.

Cool looking plants! I bet you have to handle them with tongs...

I can clearly see the different colors. But wouldn't a wild bromeliad tend to be stable? Are you suggesting that you could (not necessarily should) breed the color variation out by judicious selection?

Agree that PJ should have taken more time to stabilize the reaper as you suggest. Perhaps he also sends out seeds from poor phenotypes. (Did I use the word correctly?)

Interestingly, we're trying to do something similar here. Last year I planted a batch of "Peter pepper" seeds and got one plant that may well be a hybrid (named "St. Peter). Smooth pods, larger more prolific plant, and flesh that has the odor of rose petals when opened. I sent out a bunch of seeds and others are growing them. (Mama froze off this year.) Hopefully we can replicate those characteristics in the children.

FWIW, some seed propagators apparently do as you suggest. Especially, the many plants I've grown from seeds from scorpion_john and fusion_power (a commercial grower) are regularly healthy and true. In the hobbyist world, it may be that many growers don't have enough experience of what is "true" to be able to select, nor the variety of plants to notice that one is better than the other. They send on what they have.

From that point of view, one might be surprised that we do as well as we do. ;)

Dennis