My first Carolina Reaper (ever), but ...

teejay

teejay

Hi All,
 
Here's a photo of my first ever Carolina Reaper (amongst good company).
 
I think it's showing it's Habanero heritage as opposed to the 7 Pot Primo in the centre and Yellow Morouga Scorpion to the left.
 
J9WMuFv.jpg

 
I can't say I am impressed with my Reaper plants - I have two growing and only 10 or less fruit on them, and only one is starting to look like a Reaper per-se. But my Primo plant, immediately next door, is pumping out AWESOME pods (as per the photo above). Kudos to Troy !
 
Regards,
 
Tim
 
Umm, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but that doesn't look anything like a Carolina Reaper to me...
 
Leave it to me to say it, the 7 Pot Primo in the middle looks more like a Carolina Reaper than the one on the right.  Last year, grew smome reapers upside down in a basket that was way, way too small.  Plant was super stunted.  Really cool looking, but really small.  The tiny peppers still resembled the 7 Pot Primo and not the one on the right in your photo.

Where did your seeds come from?
 
Last year i got "reapers" on amazon (i didnt know about thp yet) .. my pods looked similar to that.. judy said they were red savina habanero or something like that.. they werent what i wanted, but they were pretty good in a stuffing for fried pablanos according to the little woman
 
Hi All,
 
The seed for both plants came from a trustworthy member here.
 
Of the two plants, the one that produced the pod in the photo is quite large and it's very healthy - it's in a very large raised garden bed, and in fact the primo plant is immediately next to it, and just look at that pod ! Quality soil and all the best ferts, etc.
 
The other plant is in the ground (just outside my shadehouse with the raised garden bed) and is showing much more promise - one or two pods look like they will become the "traditional" reaper shape.
 
I have to say though, the variation in pods, even though there aren't many, is quite pronounced.
 
My primo's though - what a collection of little beasts ! I have some coming up that seem to be more tail than actual body of the fruit. Shall post some pics when they are ready.
 
Regards,
 
Tim

Here's another pod from the same plant that produced the "reaper" in the original photo:
 
CS4jYZ5.jpg

 
We then move on to an example from the other "reaper" plant in the ground:
 
2hMZrAQ.jpg

 
But now the crown jewels - my Primo's !
 
1vRlsSh.jpg

vWLbGAF.jpg
 
When I google carolina reaper images, I get pictures of peppers that look very different from one another. The questions is what the real reaper should look like? I grew reapers for 2 years now, most of them look different than the op picture, however I got some that looked similar to trinidad scorpions. I guess the truth is out there :)
 
My experience is that carolina reapers look like 7 pot primo except I get more of the tiny thin tails from my primos than i do from my carolina reapers.  Some of the first reapers I grew had inverted stingers, didnt save those seeds so it gets better each year.
 
TrentL - Those are some of the deepest red reapers I have seen.  Did you rinse them off right before the photo?  They almost look like they have been waxed like grocery store produce.  Like hard candy.  Hey now, there is a practical joke waiting to happen.
 
Do me a favor.  Look at the ones that do not have tails and see if maybe the tails are inverted.  I had some where the tail was inside the peppers.  I only noticed once I cut one open that there was a tail.  After that, I could look at the bottom of a tailless one and see if there was a dimple where the tail should be.  Wondering if anyone else ever had that.

I call them reaper innies.
 
ajdrew said:
TrentL - Those are some of the deepest red reapers I have seen.  Did you rinse them off right before the photo?  They almost look like they have been waxed like grocery store produce.  Like hard candy.  Hey now, there is a practical joke waiting to happen.
Click to expand...
 
The top reaper from 2013 probably *was* just washed, but the second one wasn't.
 
But the red; that's just my Nokia phone. 
 
It's camera sensor is crazy sensitive to red. 
 
That 2013 plant was overwintered and I continued harvesting off of it the next year; look at the variety in pod shapes off of the one potted plant here;
 
gj3ZtYXh.jpg

 
 
And another pick from that same plant;
 
Es1OvYdh.jpg

 
 
I also had some seeds from Ed not really run true at all in 2014. The "not" reapers were nowhere near as hot (but still quite brutal) and they looked a lot more like Nagas.
 
3QWzU4Bh.png

 
(I had to crop that from a larger "bounty" pic as I didn't take any comparing the reaper pod shapes; there's pods from 4 plants there. Two of them grew in classic reaper shape and two grew long, looking like nagas.)
 
On what you called non reapers not being all that hot.  I am rounding numbers to make the math easier: If the peak is 2,000,000 and the average is 1,500,000, we can see how the minimum could be 1,000,000 depending on how many of each rating were tested.  There is a Wikipedia war going on about the Carolina Reaper.  People keep changing things, but it currently says the thing ranges from 1,150,000 to 2,200,000.  So a reaper can be about the same heat level as a ghost pepper.

Some of that swing might be dna, but I think a lot of it is how they are grown, weather conditions, temperature.  I wonder if those things might not effect shape also.  Was 2014 particularly hot, wet, cold, dry or anything like that for you?  I figure that could make a huge difference because I have grown the carolina reaper seeds from Pepper Joe and from Puckerbutt.  The seeds from Pepper Joe produced fruit that looked much more like the reaper should than the seeds from Puckerbutt.  Thing is, Pepper Joe was getting his seeds from Puckerbutt.  So I have to figure I did something differently between the two patches, maybe the soil is different or I watered one more.
 
Then again, the guy from Buckeye Peppers [forget his name] reported a tiny number of naga looking not reapers.  A percentage so small that it was actually proof of stability, not instability.  So if it is a dna thing, maybe Puckerbutt isn't mixing and randomizing seed stock.  With only 10 seeds per pack, while it doesn't seem likely, I suppose all of your seeds could have come from a single pod among a million.  Come to think of it, that could explain the controversy about instability and how one person can claim stable while another unstable.
 
ajdrew, I had a mix of reapers & not-reapers. In 2014 I actually started out quite a lot; 50 seeds. About 1/3 were culled right after sprouting. More on pot-up. I ended up with about 30 in 3" pots. About half of those made the cut to larger 6" / 1 gal pots. The 4 strongest of those went in the dirt. Several more went in to pots of various sizes (5 gal and up).
 
The 2013 batch I'd got from pepperjoe; but from that order I had more "nots" than true, across the board. Butch T's that came out like habaneros. 7-pots that weren't even close; wrong color, wrong shape, etc. The high failure rate to grow true from that led me to order 2014's seeds straight from Ed Currie (the remainder of my seeds were sourced from Judy last year).
 
If I laid peppers from those two not-reaper plants from last year next to peppers from my naga morich plant, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Even in tasting them, smelling them, they were non distinguishable. 
 
I started thinking that "maybe I mixed up a tag?" but everything else grew true out of 200 plants so there were no mix-ups. :)
 
I chalked it up to a minor instability. The ones with the right shape and tails were marked "Reaper" when I sent out SFRB and the ones without were marked "Not Reapers?" :)
 
I had the *same* exact thing happen with one Butch T plant last year, for what it's worth! 
 
I don't mind. Hot is hot. And either way, true to form or not, those bastards were hot.
 
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