Piri-piri x KS Lemon Starrburst F1
As my flair states, I'm mainly focusing on interspecific hybrids, especially C. frutescens with other species. I treat my Piri-piri as `functionally frutescens`, even when it's not 100% pure species (as you probably know, Piri-piri is a name used for a group of peppers cultivated in Africa that came from Malagueta brought there by Portuguese), since it looks pretty similar to Malagueta, thus fitting most of frutescens traits.
So, I've decided to show this hybrid here as well; people in Pepper Lovers discord probably have seen it already. So, what we have here, is C. frutescens x chinense that uses two of cultivars I like quite a lot. Main goal is to create pepper that would be a good sauce material (from experience, sauce made from fermented mash made from mix of Piri-piri and KSLSB was already pretty good), so taste and productivity would be a priority (which I thing wouldn't be a problem, both parents are pretty productive), anything else like nice shape and yellow fruit would be just a bonus.
I keep one plant isolated on windowsill inside to produce F2 seeds, while other three grow outside, either in pots or in vegetable patch. As it's a tradition in many interspecific hybrids, fertility is pretty bad, in first batch there was between 50 and 60 flowers, out of which only 6 of them became fruits. Still one of the best frutescens x chinense I have grown so far, up until this one the best result was 4 fruits with 7 seeds total. From those 6 fruits I've got 20 seeds which means F2 is already shaping up better than other fxc crosses. And, second batch of flowers already turned out better, I am currently looking at 9-10 fruits from selfing, possibly more. Open pollination outside fares much better, I'd say 78-80% of flowers turned into fruits, but most of them are probably from pollinations with foreign pollen - fruits are bigger (up to even 2 times longer) and contain way more seeds.
Isolated plant, as you can see on photo and description, started with quadruple cotyledons, something I've seen for the first time - granted, I didn't grow hundreds of thousands of pepper plants yet, but I've seen a fair share of tricots from various chinense plants. I'd say it's pretty unique - and while nothing is yet determined, since I'm not growing F2 yet, the way that plant grows may actually suggest presence of polycotyledons gene (either pc-1, pc-2 or pc-3, link), but that's to be determined next year.