Just when pepper growing was turning mundane and boring for me because of poor seasons, late starts, awful weather, never having the proper time to invest due to critical priorities and yadda yadda, something has happened to perk my enthusiasm. Bigtime.
No way to keep some long stories short but I'll do my best. Back in 2015 I lost my 4 year old habanero permaplants when I forgot to turn on heat lamp on the wrong night. Rather than start new ones I looked around for some of the new-to-me superhot plants I'd heard of. I found a grower (I call him Billy Peppers) over in Florida who had some things I would be interested in. I went over and came home with two small reapers, a much larger scorpion and a big jar of kickass pepper jelly. The reapers did very little that year but the scorpion made some pods for me. They weren't what I was expecting them to look like but come to find out they were CARDI scorpions. I made three new plants from seeds of those first pods. This is some of what they produced in 2016.
I kept the original mama plant and the best of those three sprouts and thoroughly enjoyed them until this last winter when I totally misjudged the amount of heat needed in the hillbilly winter shelter due to the severity of the five day record cold that bracketed Christmas. As it turned out, I lost everything except for one of the original 2015 reapers and a douglah. I had hopes for many but this was like a slow motion train wreck as they slowly died over time. I put them all in the sun along the fence fed and watered them. I thought those scorpions would come back but they didn't. I had started a new one that did well and is still making pods.
Shifting gears here, I always wished for a CARDI Scorpion plant that made yellow peppers because I love yellow peppers. I know there are all sorts of so-called yellow CARDI pepper seeds available but they're Butch T looking things so I don't know what they really are. I've always watched the CARDI site to see if they would ever release a yellow CARDI scorpion. Still haven't seen that happen.
Now, here's the happy accident. One by one as I pronounced my permaplants dead, I moved them back to a bonepile in the shade by the pumphouse. One of the later ones to give it up was one of my old mama douglah plants. Sometime in midsummer a sprout appeared in this pot. My pissed off, knee jerk reaction was to pull the sprout but I left it alone and let it grow. When it became obvious it was a pepper plant, I amputated the previous resident at the stump and moved the pot back into the light. The plant grew and started making some late season flowers and pods. It soon became apparent these pods weren't douglah but looked like CARDI scorpion. Cool. In early October some of the pods started ripening up and were sure looking like they were going to ripen yellow. They did. Here are the first four that made it to maturity. They look like a yellow CARDI scorpion to me. Something I've been wishing for since I got my first taste of the red CARDI scorpions.
I just opened a more recently ripened small one and finally took my first taste of these. It is indeed sweet and delicious and really spicy. It's most definitely CARDI scorpion spicy. To begin, I tasted that first little pinch off the bottom. That gave me fat lips for a half hour. I will continue tasting the rest of it today and tonight until it's gone. Haha, a ritual capsaicin experience.
Do any of the more skilled minds around here have any thoughts on this? I don't have the foggiest idea how this happened but I am very pleased. I'm definitely gonna grow this plant out for a few years and see where it goes. I sure want to know if this happy accident is repeatable. If the plant survives recent torment, there can be no unhappy accidents with this young lady. This one will probably become a houseplant soon.
