Pfeffer said:
Everyone knows that stressed chillis be come hotter. UK plants are much better cared for, while the outdoor plants burn, get nasty critters and dry up once in a while.
Sources?
I've read that now and then too but many people consider it more of an urban myth than fact. There have even been studies where peppers were shown to increase capsaicin in response to higher humidity, wetter climates.
I will speculate that the factor that dominates everything else is # of pods growing, that the chemical compounds needed for capsaicin production will be higher concentration the fewer pods that are growing, while most other factors will change rate of plant growth more than anything else.
Granted since many of the hotter peppers tend to fork, and fork again, with each additional amount of growth leading to twice the nodes and then buds, there may be a higher ratio of peppers to the rest of the plant. However, many of us are not looking for very few, slightly hotter peppers instead of multiple times as many "hot enough" peppers.
I think we do have enough evidence to conclude that a huge healthy plant produces the most capsaicin in total by far over a season then what remains is distribution to how many pods it produces, that if you keep the other variables a constant, there's no way a small plant producing one pod could have it 100 times as hot as a large plant producing 100 pods.
This may be an extreme example but from testing I've seen hotness level doesn't usually vary by more than 300% if even that... a far cry from the difference in pod production from a small stressed plant and a large healthy one.
Pfeffer said:
I'd recommend stressing your plants if you want the hottest peppers. Capsaicin is a natural deterrent to make sure mammals don't eat the fruits, but just birds (that don't kill the seeds but distribute it all over the rainforrest). If the plant thinks it's dying it will try to improve it's reproductive odds by better protecting it's seed (= capsaicin increase). Dry them out, prune them, pick some unripe fruits once in a while.. basically scare the shit out of the plants prehistoric instincts.
I'd recommend less speculation and more sources. While it may seem logical to assume capsaicin is a response to mammals not eating peppers on the surface, this really doesn't hold valid.
1) Other plants survive fine without this evolutionary change. Hot peppers are a minority plant, not a majority.
2) Many mammals will also pass seed through their digestive tract so it would increase chance of survival for peppers to not be offensive to mammals. It would be another method of spreading to new areas and actually mammals do eat hot peppers in a high stress environment where there is limited to no other food.
There are plenty of birds around here both large and small and they do not flock to my peppers, instead greatly preferring high sugar and water berries on other plants. They will fly miles to a berry bush but leave thousands of my pepper pods sitting there untouched as they hop around the plants looking for worms, berries, and other seeds.
3) You wrote "think". Plants don't think. They don't react, merely responding the best their genetics allow with the best adaptations having higher seed production - which has no direct relation to capsaicin. On the contrary as I speculated above it could be that peppers with lower capsaicin due to increased # of pods, have higher seed rate, are less offensive to mammals, and have the higher survival rate.
Another reason this would be fair to speculate is that in nature, the majority of plants on earth don't have much if any capsaicin level, including those in the areas hot peppers have greatest numbers in the wild.
4) The rest of the suggestions are not reasonable to consider without a lot of scientifically valid testing including a large sample size and years of research. In nature stress generally does not increase survival rate at all. It thins the herd. We could say the strongest survive but there is no evidence that strongest = highest capsaicin level per pod.
And how does watering your plants less equate to "crazy amounts of excessive work"? Another contradiction....
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