Summer Salad Surprise

So my wife and I go up to Tulsa OK to my Son’s new house in Bixby he bought last fall and spent all of fall and winter remodeling. Bixby is well known in OK as Garden Capital of Oklahoma and once supplied ½ of the vegetables consumed by WW-II soldiers.

Anyway like Father like Son Anthony plants his first garden and love to BBQ so he invites Mom and Dad up for his first BBQ featuring items from his garden and a little help from Conrad Farms in Bixby with sweet corn. One of our favorite summer salads use roasted sweet corn cu t off the cod with vine ripe tomatoes, sweet green peppers, sweet onions, basil, balsamic vinegar, olive oil, and S&P.

So to start the rib dinner Anthony gets the salad and his wife starts it off by filling her plate with salad and passes the bowl. She cannot wait and takes a big fork full of salad and stuffs it in her face. Within a second or two she gasp for breath, turns beet red, and tears rolling down her cheeks. After viewing the garden before dinner I had an idea what was wrong so I took a bite of the sweet green bell pepper. You guessed right it was blazing HOT.

Anthony took a bite and yelled WTF happened dad? I laughed and said you cannot grow hot and sweet peppers in the same garden. His Biker Billy Jalapeno’s and Big Jim New Mex pollinated his green peppers making rocket hot Mexi-Bells.

The boy was embarrassed to say the least. I just had to tease him after 10 years of college and being a Doctor he did not know squat about gardening. However not all is lost. He loves Mexican food and can now make some killer Releno’s or stuffed green peppers. But back to the store for sweet bell peppers.

Thought I would share with you and hope you found it amusing. In addition if you do not know, don’t grow sweet and hot peppers together. God I miss Tulsa.

[clkeiper]

Were these pepper seeds he saved and regrew or was he growing the peppers from a plant he bought? Just having them in the same garden isn't going to make rocket hot peppers form on sweet bell pepper plants. Did someone accidentally label hot peppers as sweet peppers?

[carolyn137]

Originally Posted by dereckbc

So my wife and I go up to Tulsa OK to my Son’s new house in Bixby he bought last fall and spent all of fall and winter remodeling. Bixby is well known in OK as Garden Capital of Oklahoma and once supplied ½ of the vegetables consumed by WW-II soldiers.

Anyway like Father like Son Anthony plants his first garden and love to BBQ so he invites Mom and Dad up for his first BBQ featuring items from his garden and a little help from Conrad Farms in Bixby with sweet corn. One of our favorite summer salads use roasted sweet corn cu t off the cod with vine ripe tomatoes, sweet green peppers, sweet onions, basil, balsamic vinegar, olive oil, and S&P.

So to start the rib dinner Anthony gets the salad and his wife starts it off by filling her plate with salad and passes the bowl. She cannot wait and takes a big fork full of salad and stuffs it in her face. Within a second or two she gasp for breath, turns beet red, and tears rolling down her cheeks. After viewing the garden before dinner I had an idea what was wrong so I took a bite of the sweet green bell pepper. You guessed right it was blazing HOT.

Anthony took a bite and yelled WTF happened dad? I laughed and said you cannot grow hot and sweet peppers in the same garden. His Biker Billy Jalapeno’s and Big Jim New Mex pollinated his green peppers making rocket hot Mexi-Bells.

The boy was embarrassed to say the least. I just had to tease him after 10 years of college and being a Doctor he did not know squat about gardening. However not all is lost. He loves Mexican food and can now make some killer Releno’s or stuffed green peppers. But back to the store for sweet bell peppers.

Thought I would share with you and hope you found it amusing. In addition if you do not know, don’t grow sweet and hot peppers together. God I miss Tulsa.

Any crossing of hot and sweet peppers that occurs in one season, shouldn't be seen until saved seeds are grown out the next season.

But there are differences of opinion about that and here are three links that discuss it.

http://aggie-horticulture.tamu.edu/a...es/pepper.html

http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/l...030405901.html

http://www.southernexposure.com/isol...rs-ezp-34.html

If you do a Google search, as I did, most agree that any xing of hot and sweet peppers is not seen in the same season, only seeds that are saved and grown out the next season.

Carolyn, who had just one bad death defying hot pepper experience. A friend had a son in India and I asked if the son could bring back some tomato and pepper seed. He did. All packs were written English. One of the pepper packs was labeled Elephant Ears. So I chomp into a large green pepper, thinking it was ripe, nothing said on the pack that it was a hot pepper, raced across the lawn to the house and stuffed my mouth with bread with a cold milk chaser. I'm telling you that pepper was hotter than the orange habenero that a student of mine brought back seeds for me from Cameroon, Heidi Iyok, who was also the source of the variety Heidi, which many folks grow and like very much.

Originally Posted by clkeiper

Were these pepper seeds he saved and regrew or was he growing the peppers from a plant he bought?

No plants he bought from a nursery in town.

I have twelve varieties of super hot and totally mild pepper varieties growing about eighteen inches apart. So far every variety tastes as it should and the heat hasn't crossed over. I might be in for a surprise next year though.

Ted

[clkeiper]

Honestly. I think the plants must have been mislabeled.

[shelleybean]

For the sake of crop rotation, I grow all my peppers together (with tomatoes and eggplant) and have never had a problem. Hot is hot, sweet is sweet. Sounds like something got mixed up somewhere along the way. When you're not expecting that heat and you take a big bite, it could make for a terrible surprise.

We made a Caribbean dinner here one night. Jerk chicken, coconut rice, grilled pineapple, etc. I put a whole habenaro in the rice just like you'd put a bay leaf in something, intending to pull it out after cooking. My brother-in-law got to the rice before I did and ate the whole thing, seeds and all. He turned red, tears rolling down. We thought he might be choking but finally he gasped "orange thing" and we figured it out. Took him all night to recover but he is alive today.