Halloween Night

Okay, so as you know (if you've been reading this blog), I have a NuMex Halloween pepper I sprouted from some saved seed I had. All of the seed I started came from the same dried pod from last year, but one of them turned out different from the others...

Go on, guess which one.

Seemed runty and damaged from as soon as it sprouted, but since I have this big grow cabinet, there was no reason to cull it, I had plenty of space and rain water is free, so I let it go.  Figured it was probably damaged enough that it would eventually just die.  Well, while watering today, I noticed this.

You see what I see?  Its finally putting out a new leaf.  My level of interest has now flipped from "Eh, just let it do whatever until it dies" to "What if this new leaf maintains the dark coloration?  What if this isn't a damaged plant, but a mutation?"

I have the grow box, so I have the facilities to grow year round now.  If this plant proves to be a unique phenotype, I'm going to isolate it as soon as it starts to bud to prevent any potential cross contamination and see if I can get it to breed true.

If it proves to be a unique genotype as well, I'm definitely going to try to stabilize it.  Lol, wouldn't that beat all?  Spend all this time and effort trying to make a kick ass Reaper bonchi, and the real success story being one of the "something to keep busy and practice on for the blog" side projects ends up being a whole new pepper strain that makes me millions of dollars?

Yeah, probably not, but it will at least be something interesting for you guys to follow along with while we wait for the reapers to get bigger.  But pie in the sky here,  I think I'll call it the Halloween Night pepper... assuming it keeps the black and orange pods.