Processing Pepper Seeds

[Zeedman]

Granted, I am far from a pepper guru... but my 2 c's.

I try to allow peppers grown for seed to mature fully on the plant. When this is not possible (due to frost), I pull the plant, pluck off all peppers except those beginning to change color, and hang the plant. Hopefully the peppers will draw some nutrients from the vegetation as it dries down. In my observations, such seed will have a lower storage life than seed which ripened normally, so I make a point of regrowing it within a year or two.

Even when peppers are fully ripe, I try to allow them to ripen further indoors before opening. With larger peppers (where I am saving the flesh for food use) I carefully cut a circle around the top, then slice downward from there along the ribs, and pull those sections off from the top down. Call me goofy... but I call this process 'squiding', since the placenta generally remains fairly intact, and somewhat resembles a squid with tentacles. At that point, if there are signs of mold in some of the peppers (some varieties seem more prone to this than others) then I remove & wash the seed immediately. If the variety shows no sign of mold, I may allow the seed to dry on the placenta... other pepper growers have claimed that this improved seed vigor. I prefer, though, to wash the seed before drying.

For thin-walled peppers (especially hot peppers) I usually dry the pods, then carefully crush them & separate the seeds. For smaller pods, I may even store the pods entire as seed, and just crush pods as needed when I need seed.

I have some reservations about the sink method. It seems to work - if you have plenty of seed, and are willing to accept that some (or much) of the seed discarded may be viable. I've often seen stubborn air bubbles clinging to the seed surface, which will cause false rejection of otherwise good seed. Stirring briskly with a wire whisk will break some of those bubbles loose, and increase the percentage of seed saved.

There is also the issue of hot pepper seed. Am I the only one to have noticed what happens when you add water to hot pepper seed??? The first time I did that, it drove me from the room coughing my lungs out. Chemical warfare comes to mind. Best done outside, or under an exhaust fan.

For very small hot peppers, I have run them in quantity (at the lowest speed) through a thrift-store blender that I modified for seed processing, by grinding the blades dull. I would not do this with peppers which have larger seeds. (This same blender works well for any wet-processed seed, such as eggplant & ground cherries.)

For the most part, after doing as much as possible to increase seed vitality, I save seed without using the sink method. After drying, I carefully remove any obviously immature or damaged seed before storage... and when planting, I pre-sort much as Dmforcier does.