Different types of peppers species cross with differing chances of success.

For best results you're going to need space...whether it's your space or space you can get your friends to share by growing out your crosses. When I do my breeding, I give seedlings out to as many people as I can with a small, unobtrusive checklist for them to note things. I go visit the plants whenever convenient, but generally only when there's some ripe peppers so I can check out what the plants have done and collect a few peppers if it's something that interests me.

When you grow out the seeds from your crosses (if you can tell there has been a take via plant/pod/flavor/etc variation distinct from the 2 parents, alone) you're going to want to have a lot of plants to choose from to see what's giving you the best results...or if it's a result that's a dead-end.

Pay attention to pretty much everything you want in a plant...growth rate, bud/flower/pod set, physical pod size/characteristics, leaf coverage of peppers for shading fruit (if that's an issue), time to ripen, flavor at different stages (green/ripe), plant height/width, etc...

A good number of plants will let you select the strongest characteristics you're looking for...or perhaps, give you a nice surprise to further investigate.

...then repeat growing out your selection(s) until it's stable enough that you don't see much variation...though further variation as generations progress might dead-end the process. It generally takes 5-7+ generations, with a majority of them showing stability, to call it "good or good enough."

The best part is that there isn't any waste unless you happen to breed something bland, unproductive, or otherwise bad tasting. Even a "failed experiment" pepper is still a pepper...and they're rarely bad tasting to the point of being inedible (I've never run across that issue).

Also, keep in mind that "hot" is an extremely dominate trait over "sweet."

Though you might get some characteristics of sweet when you cross a hot with a sweet, almost all of the time you'll get a pepper that's as hot as the pepper you made the cross with. It very rarely works out that the heat gets tamed down when you make a sweet x hot cross...it generally carries over in full-to-near-full strength.

Also, also...

Cross your peppers before the bud on your "female" pollen recipient opens. They will self-pollinate rather quickly upon opening (some while opening) if you wait until they open to attempt your cross. By removing the anthers/stamens before the bud opens the pollen is sticky and tightly held enough to lessen the chance of accidentally self-pollinating the pepper.

Find your "female" crossing partner when the bud is plump and near opening. With a knife or tweezers (I prefer tweezers) remove the bud scales and the anthers/stamens until you are left with the female pistil/stigma sticking out of the flower. Take a flower from a fully open "male" donor flower and rub it on the stigma of the "female" recipient quite well. After this, loosely cover the "female" you just pollinated with cheese cloth (or similar such as paper, but not plastic) attached/closed a bit down the stem (for stability) for 2-3 days. When it's removed you should see a small pepper emerging or soon emerging if pollination was successful.

You're going to want to do this to at least 2-4 flowers (for hobby growing) to make sure you have a good take (do more if you can). Be sure to collect seed from each pod separately, not mixed together. If a pepper accidentally self-pollinated in the process you can rogue out that entire batch of seed rather than having everything mixed up.

Thank you for the tips!!

Which crosses have you done and how were the results (anything tasty i should try?)

I've done a number of crosses over the years, mostly sweet and mild peppers. Most of the crosses I've made have ended up being tossed away because they're nothing special or unwanted characteristics came out of it.

I made a sweet pepper that I shared seed from a few years ago called "Crunch Sweet Orange" that's a tall-growing, heavy yielding, super-sweet + fruity, 2-3" thick-walled sweet pepper. For a long time, creating this sweet pepper was my sole focus in breeding and I tried many different combinations before stumbling onto this keeper.

I'm currently working on an Anahiem x Cubanelle cross that produces 6-8" pods that taper blunt-ended and are quite wide/fat. I had a Cubanelle that was my main focus because of it's flavor (though it was thin-walled and had little/no heat) and I've tried breeding it with various Anaheim types in order to find appropriate takes. It's currently a highly flavorful frying pepper with thick-ish flesh and Anahiem-like heat. It's not stable or uniform yet, though. It's going to take a few more years and my main issues are yield output and pod size rather than flavor at this point. I'm growing 3 lines off of it right now in order to get better characteristics and I may end up cross breeding a couple of the lines together to see if I can hasten/force some of the desired characteristics to come true to my vision.

what's it take to get some of those crunch sweet orange seeds?

also, it's great to have people like you on this forum to inject some science into our discussions. botany/biology is not my strong suite. any questions about the physics or mathematics involved, I can help with. if you wanna talk about the energy involved in cooking your peppers, I'm your guy. but when it comes to the science of how they grow, I'm worse than a noob.

I don't have any to pass around this year...deer ate my seed stock plants this season (I hate deer).

I passed out over 100 envelopes of seed back in 09/10, though I found out later my seed offer made it to other forums and Reddit so it's hard to figure out what percentage of people actually have it on this board vs elsewhere.

Some other people might have some seed. I'm going to produce more seed next season that will be available for SASE in Fall/Winter 2014.

understandable. sorry to hear that.

I'd say I hate deer as well, but to date I've never had any deer related plant damage (some car damage though), and I find them far too delicious to write them off entirely as a species.

The deer ate every tomato of any size, and while they trimmed my pepper plants on occasion, basically left them alone.

However, some human person made off with my Fresno, pods and all. So I guess I hate people.

Dennis

Must have been a Californian. :)

What gets me is that the fresno was the least interesting plant (geographical associations aside) in the whole garden. It was healthy and there were a few unripe pods, but it was small and didn't look like much. There were much more interesting plants with ripe pods sitting right there.

Hell, maybe it was deer. Ooo that's a nasty thought - deer with a hand truck.

Jason.... I have some crunch sweet orange seeds if you're still interested. Just let me know if you haven't found any. This was my first year growing that variety, but I think I saved seeds from multiple peppers. Just shoot me an e-mail. I believe I still have your address.

Thanks for the seeds initially nc-crn. I don't believe I got them directly from you, but now that I know it was your creation, it's nice to thank the person responsible for the strain. I'm about 30 minutes west of Charlotte in Lincoln county. Are you any where close to me?

Tim

Raleigh here...enjoying the slow start to winter.