Designing Sweet Peppers:
My Work to Elevate Them to Center Stage of Local Foods
By Doug Jones, Piedmont Biofarm

I struggled for decades to grow decent peppers in the chilly St. Lawrence River Valley; now in the North Carolina Piedmont, I can grow them up to seven feet tall on a suitable trellis, picking ripe reds, yellows, oranges, chocolates – and a spectrum of unripe greens, limes, yellows, and purples – for over four months, and longer with a greenhouse.  Imagine how much Vitamin C and “phyto-nutrients” we bring in from those fields every week!  And cooks and consumers are increasingly appreciating the huge versatility of this miraculous food.

For those who choose to actually grow this sturdy plant, other attributes abound.  While the diseases of tomatoes occupy the largest chapter of plant pathology textbooks, peppers are typically much less plagued, even in our disease-prone humid climate.  My tomatoes, squashes, and cukes have long ago turned to fungal dust when the peppers are just hitting their stride.  Catch a tomato fruit in that fleeting moment we call “ripe”, or else dump it in the worm bin.  But abuse a pepper fruit picked almost ripe, and still choose which day among eight to crunch on it – perhaps no longer actually crunchy on the eighth day, but sweeter than ever as it turns to soft leather, (often my favorite stage for eating!)  Snack on a ripe pepper anywhere, while wearing your best clothes, but don’t even think of tomatoes.

Want to save some seeds?  There they are, almost dry, ready to scrape off the core, finish drying, and store till February when they begin a new life of service to the delight and survival of human beings.  I save a lot of vegetable seeds, and peppers are up there with okra and soybeans for easiest to process.

For me, saving seeds is less about preserving heirlooms from extinction, than it is about enabling me to create something uniquely new on the face of the Earth.  This is the crux of my work:  If we accept the notion that peppers can play an important role in a localized diet, then it’s important to look at the varieties that show up in seed catalogs, to test them and see which ones measure up, and – as we discover how many of them are unsuited for that pivotal role – to then set about finding the best varieties and making them better for our purposes.  And sometimes we might find it very useful to cross some of them to combine desired attributes.

Modern peppers have been bred for yield, durability and uniformity of fruits, rarely for flavor.  The genetics are designed to meet the needs of large scale growers and distributors, not the consumer or the small grower. Many were bred to be solid and high yielding as green peppers, but are absolutely bland when they ripen to red or yellow; often they will start to rot before they reach the ripe stage because they were only bred to be good at the green stage.  Some have been bred assuming they will be pampered by agrochemicals.  Most supermarket peppers are hybrids, the parents of which only the breeder knows.  You have to buy seed from them to get the same uniformity.

I want peppers to become an everyday food.  So they need superior flavor.  But since most will be grown by small-scale commercial growers, they also need to be productive, vigorous, disease resistant, heat tolerant, and of reasonably long shelf life.  Many of the heirlooms have the flavor, but they fall short in some of these other qualities.  Some can use improvement in other areas, like drought tolerance, fruit size, fruit shape, and leaf canopy.

As of this writing in November, 2008, I have many promising breeding lines going.  Some I also call “exciting”, meaning I can hardly wait till next season to see the results of the selecting I’ve been doing.  Some were already quite good when I got them, but simply by growing them for a few generations and taking seeds from the best looking plants, I am adapting them to my local soil and climate conditions.

In October of this year, Abundance Foundation helped me present a “Pepper Tasting Extravaganza”.  We put a bunch of modern hybrids with big blocky juicy fruits up against my collection of red, yellow, and chocolate-colored breeding lines, and about 45 attendees rated them for sweetness and other flavors and textures (samples were only identified by an arbitrary assigned number).  As I expected, most of mine scored better than most of the hybrids.  These Dutch and Japanese hybrids were part of a variety trial that I did on contract with the Seeds of Change company.  We are evaluating them for possible inclusion in their commercial growers catalog, reflecting the lack of reliable non-hybrid (“open-pollinated”) sweet peppers that measure up to the standards and needs of smaller commercial growers.  That lack, that gap, is what I intend to fill, at least for the growers of the Southeast.

As a grower-breeder, I have at least one advantage over breeders in large seed companies:  I can get immediate feedback from customers as I develop varieties, and I can see the performance under our local soil and climate conditions.   Ideally, I need to collaborate with other local growers and gardeners to share germplasm, to get my breeding lines tested on their soil and in their market context.  I welcome correspondence from other folks who would like to try my material and give me feedback.  Please write