Serrano Seedlings

[jmsieglaff]

A few years ago I tried a few different kinds of hot peppers. Serranos won out as the right combination of flavor and heat. We don't use a ton of hot peppers (aside from making roasted tomatillo salsa) so we only grow two plants of Serranos each year. Every year I notice those seedlings come up from an elbow, cotyledons open with the tiny seedling vertical, then the stems bend over and the cotyledons go down to the potting mix, then they go vertical again and grow normally. This doesn't happen to my sweet bell peppers or yummy bells nor tomatoes, tomatillos, etc. Does anyone else see this happen to their serranos or maybe this is common with hot peppers? I grow them fairly cool maybe that has something to do with it? I've never had issues with damping off, so I don't think that is it.

[RayR]

I've never seen that with Serrano or any other pepper. I've got 5 Serrano seedlings a couple weeks old and never noticed anything different in growth behavior.

[Doug9345]

The two seedlings I have are a day or two old and don't look or act any different than any other pepper seedling.

[ddsack]

I did see this on 2 of 6 Serrano seedlings this year. I didn't notice if they slumped over or whether they didn't ever straighten up after emerging, but they kept humped backs with seed leaves dragging on the ground for quite a few days before they tried to straighten up. At first I thought they might be weak from starting to damp off, but the stems were thick and normal at ground level, and the cots were actually greener than the other normal seedlings. They have very slowly straightened up (with poking and nudging from me) and can't be told from the normal seedlings. I don't remember seeing this before.

[jmsieglaff]

Originally Posted by ddsack

I did see this on 2 of 6 Serrano seedlings this year. I didn't notice if they slumped over or whether they didn't ever straighten up after emerging, but they kept humped backs with seed leaves dragging on the ground for quite a few days before they tried to straighten up. At first I thought they might be weak from starting to damp off, but the stems were thick and normal at ground level, and the cots were actually greener than the other normal seedlings. They have very slowly straightened up (with poking and nudging from me) and can't be told from the normal seedlings. I don't remember seeing this before.

That's pretty much my experience (aside from the different leaf color) with serranos each year--been growing Serrano Del Sol F1 for the past 3 years from seed.

[ddsack]

I used my own saved seed from 2009, as far as I can remember, it was just a generic OP Serrano, don't remember where I got the original seed from, may have been Pinetree. I had some newer seed, but noticed last year that it had crossed with something, as some of the plants had peppers larger and longer than I expected, so went back to use some older seed. It was a little odd, because the humpbacked seedlings were right next to each other in the flat, so I wondered if there was some other factor in the soil that caused it in that spot, but sounds like it was just random chance for the 6 seeds.