Dutch-Habanero
The Dutch-Habanero project has been an interesting crossing experience which started about 5 years before this article.
For this experiment, I wanted to have two completely different chiles to start with.
Habanero (C. chinense)
And Dutch Chile (C. annuum), a basic Market chile.
With these two completely different chiles it was more clear to see the properties of the both parents more clearly.
I pollinated the Dutch Chile plant (mother) with some Habanero pollen (Father).
When few flowers were pollinated and labeled, I let the pods grow and ripen.
At that point, they still looked like normal Dutch Chile pods.
I took the seeds and germinated them and soon after that, I had the first F1 plants growing.
It turned out to be one of the greatest varieties I had grown!
Very prolific and compact plants with lots and lots of heat!
Especially useful when powdered as mature.
After few years of growing F1 plants, I wanted to develop the variety even more, so I took seeds from the F1 plants and germinated some to get some new properties and I resulted with a few nice F2 plants.
The plants were quite different and the pods tasted very different and they were all hot, except for the one, which was almost heatless, strange!
Different Dutch-Habanero F2 pods.
Again, at the end of the season, I took seeds (much more this time) from the best F2 plants and germinated them and got about 15 different F3 plants.
Different Dutch-Habanero F3 pods.
From those plants, I will choose few plants I like the most and take seeds from them too for the next F4 generation.
In fact, I already germinated two F4 plants from the first ripened F3 variety, and the seedlings are doing just fine at the moment!
It has been very fun and didactic experience, I highly recommend trying it with your own favorite varieties.
Does huge habaneros sound tempting? Habanero x Bell Pepper cross might easily result that kind of pods!
More specific instructions for crossing HERE