Chili Pepper Fun.

I've blogged before about my chili pepper plant shenanigans - after sadly killing off all my Ecuador Purple chili plants, I tried to grow new ones from my seeds, but alas, they were too old and didn't germinate anymore.

So I threw seeds from a spice jar into soil. They were taken from my own chilis, so there would have been a chance of them being Ecuador Purple, but I had no luck there. In parallel, because I wanted to make sure, I mail ordered some chili seeds, and some tomato seeds while I was at it. Those, obviously, included Ecuador Purple seeds.

Well. The spice jar plants all have rather similar upright, slender, pointed peppers in a boring green, maybe with a hint of black in one or two plants. Some have a curved fruit here and there. Altogether... rather boring; I'd have expected some more variation, because they were taken from different plants that, by all rights, should not have been true-to-seed (yet). Anyways, one of them at least now has produced a single fruit that is sort of dancing out of line:



Possibly that is an effect of cross-pollination; our place and the chili plants were definitely well-visited by insects working hard to pollinate. If it is, the same effect may be the reason why this oddly-shaped fruit is growing on an Ecuador Purple plant:



This is definitely not the shape you'd expect it to be. However, I suspect that the guy I bought the seeds from does not grow his plants well-separated from each other. There was a lot of variation between the individual pepper and tomato plants regarding their size and growth shape. One of the tomatoes and several of the pepper plants were also very far away from the breed description.

Also, there's this, which is also supposed to be an Ecuador Purple chili:



The plant has several of these weird winged fruits.

I don't mind too much, since I mostly want the chilis for their decorative value, and that is certainly quite decorative - but if I had wanted 'proper' breed seeds, I'd certainly be very disappointed. I am a bit disappointed about the tomato seeds, in that regard. I'm also not really happy with the germination quota (which was not very good - and yes, I note down how many seeds I stick into the soil, and how many plants come out). So I'll definitely not order seeds there again.

What I will do, though, is grow plants from those odd fruits, and see if anything even odder will come out!