There's a method called bagging the blossoms or you could get some insect floating row cover and cover he whole plant

How does pollination occur then? Do you do it by hand, if so, how?

Peppers are self pollinators.Each bud has everything it needs to pollinate itself.
Put something similar to a paint strainer bag for a 1-5 gal, bucket over a small plant or a branch and give it a shake every so often and let nature take it's coarse.
tie some string loosely around the pod stems that were self pollinated if you take the netting off the plant once you see a few pods are growing that were pollinated in the bag for pure seeds.
All you need is a few pure pods for seed so you don't need to keep the bag on all the time.Just make syre you mark the pure pods.
I found that pods seem to take longer to ripen if I leave the bag on.Probably because the bag blocks out the sunlight.

You only need to to leave the "bag" on till you see a little green growth inside the blossom

The seeds you saved may not be crossed and are certainly not useless. Another method is to cover the unopened bud with white glue ( Elmers) which the growing pepper will push off.

john

Ok so I have a question.. I have seen postings that you can hand pollinate with a paint brush, however the above indicates they can pollinate on their own no problem, or am I mis-reading and Smokemaster means they have what it takes, they just need a little help.

So the pepper pushes off the glue and the glue prevents cross-pollination?

I've been curious about cross pollination and went on the FAQ however that chart was seriously greek to me.

Ok, then John, if precautions aren't taken with bags and glue and such.. it's not like everything you're growing will cross. Correct? In theory Mile High could use her seeds and be ok next year?

I know these may sound like rookie questions but I know someone out there is thinking, yeah that chart in the FAQ was greek thank goodness someone is falling on the rookie sword!

Thanks everyone!

Erin

Peppers efficiently self-pollinate. If you really want to make sure you get more than "efficient" production you can go through the trouble of hand-pollinating, but it's generally just not worth it because of how naturally efficient the plants are by themselves. For the most part, people hand-pollinate in order to cross (forced pollination between plants) peppers for hybrids.

Even if you don't bag your seed fruits to ensure no cross pollination you still have a pretty good chance your seed is self-pollinated (that's how good they are at self-pollinating). The thing is, though...especially if you're growing a small garden or for-profit garden...sometimes "pretty good chance" isn't worth taking a chance on.