Saving Pepper Seeds: When You Should and Should NOT!

Saving pepper seeds should be a slam dunk, right? Just save the biggest, best pepper from your harvest and remove the seeds for next year. But wait…there is something you need to know.

Pepper plants are easily cross-pollinated by insects and you won’t realize your seeds are not “true” until next summer when it’s too late to do anything about it. Let me show you what I mean (as in: let’s learn from my mistakes!)

Look closely at this picture. These are my current favorite peppers: shishitos.

I first experienced shishito peppers in a swanky restaurant in down-town Philadelphia and my mind was blown. They were so very delicious, just roasted for a few minutes in a hot skillet and then dashed with sea salt and pepper. I couldn’t stop eating them and I thought, “I need to GROW these!”

So I ordered some shishito seeds and grew dozens of shishito pepper plants in the summer of 2019. They were incredible. They produced hundreds and hundreds of little green peppers and I roasted and ate so many I actually got tired of them and begged them to stop. I also decided they had been such a success I would definitely be planting them again.

So I saved some seeds. But I forgot what I knew about pepper plants.

Pepper plants generally self-pollinate, which means you don’t need a male and female flower to get a baby pepper. However, pepper plants are often also “open-pollinated” which means even though they don’t need a bee or other insect to come along and help the pollination process, it is absolutely possible for cross-pollination to happen if two different varieties of pepper are growing near each other.

If I only planted one kind of pepper, this would not be a problem. But gardeners, I plant many varieties. I plant bell, jalapeno, cherry, banana, and ancho peppers. And I totally forgot last year that all it takes is for one little busy bee to visit a jalapeno flower and then visit my shishito flower and BOOM – I no longer have shishito seeds – I have hybrids. And that, my friends, is exactly what happened.

I saved seeds from my best shishito plants and stored them safely all winter. In February, I planted them and celebrated all the baby shishito plants that grew. When they finally started producing peppers in my garden, I did get a few “true” shishito plants that are as we speak producing dozens of delicious little green peppers.

But…

I also grew a bunch or shishito-jalapeno hybrids that will burn your tongue off if you roast them and pop them in your mouth.

So here is the bottom line. If you only grew one kind of pepper this year (and your neighbors within 500 feet of you didn’t grow another variety of pepper) you can absolutely save your pepper seeds for next year. If however, you grew other varieties, I can’t really tell you what you are going to get if you save those seeds. To be safe, I’ll be buying my pepper seeds again this winter!

Need a recipe for all those peppers coming out of your garden? Try my Quick Pickled Peppers!