These are bushy pepper plants, some may need support but most will stand up on their own, even when weighted down with lots of fruit. They take time to become productive and once they start ripening, it's hard to keep up! So get your pepper preserving recipes handy, you'll have lots!

From our field notes: "We are losing our summer gardening enthusiasm as it gets hotter and we really want to wind things down, but these plants are still cranking and we can't keep up anymore!".

Unlike most sweet peppers that are of the Capsicum annuum species, these ones will do very well in our hot and humid climate, but will start producing later in the spring, summer, and even fall depending on their health and when they were planted.

Lots of small UFO, star-fish like shaped fruits that on occasion were a tad hot near the white inner flesh but mostly nice and sweet, and those are the only ones we saved seeds from. But on occasion you may get a surprise :)

Doug Jones is a farmer and pepper breeder in North Carolina and he gave us these seeds several years ago when Melissa was at the Carolina Farm Stewardship's Sustainable Agriculture Conference in Durham, North Carolina, and visited his farm. Doug has been working on this variety for awhile, breeding out the heat and adapting them for hot and humid southeastern summers.

Some folks looking at them say they look more like the Mad Hatter type, which indeed they do. That too is a Capsicum baccatum, but Doug is a respected and experience pepper farmer and breeder who has been working on this for many years and we trust his memory of the original variety which he worked with. Common names get very confusing especially as seeds move about under different stewardship, but regardless of knowing for certain any lineage (which of course way precedes Doug!), we know this grows well here in north Florida, giving us abundant and delicious peppers.