Loving this time of year where I am at because the pepper plants are doing their stuff. This year, I got a surprise....
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The top peppers are the little hot devils that I have been getting for a couple of years (I posted pics in this thread). The bottom pepper is a sweet Calabrian pepper (dried and fried they are out of this world). The middle is a hybrid of the two! These plants came from seeds that I harvested last year from fruit like the bottom pepper - but the plants were in close proximity to the little hot fruit plants. The fruit that the harvested seeds produced are shown in the middle - a hybrid! Both the middle and bottom fruits are from two different plants in the same pot, so environmental conditions are the same.
The hybrids are about half as hot as the tiny ones (shown on top). Although I will harvest some seeds from the hybrid, I have no idea what they will produce.
Hot Peppers help snag the Nobel for scientist...ok, it is a little bit of a stretch...but not that much
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2021/press-release/David Julius utilized capsaicin, a pungent compound from chili peppers that induces a burning sensation, to identify a sensor in the nerve endings of the skin that responds to heat.