Planting day for the Druid/Daystar F2, and BC1F1 populations (Bailey Pequin crosses)
These rows are built around Bailey Pequin, a wild/semi-wild Capsicum annuum var. glabriusculum type with intense pequin aroma, heat, stress tolerance, small fruit, and natural fruit drop at maturity. The goal is to pull that wild flavor into larger, more useful pepper forms.
Pedigrees:
Druid Line
Bailey Pequin × Milena F1
Milena brings modern orange bell genetics: thick flesh, blocky fruit, productivity, and commercial disease-resistance background.
Daystar Line
Bailey Pequin × Emerald Giant
Emerald Giant brings very large green bell fruit, field vigor, size, and yield potential.
BC1F1 populations
Backcross populations built from the Bailey Pequin × bell material, aimed at recovering more usable fruit size and flesh while keeping the wild-pequin flavor, heat, and plant resilience.
The target here is pretty simple: I want a pepper that actually makes sense for sauce. Not just “look at this weird tiny wild pepper,” and not just another generic hot blocky thing. The dream is wild pequin flavor turned into a real processing pepper — more fruit, more flesh, better harvest, but still that deep, resinous, fully-ripe wild flavor that makes pequins interesting in the first place.
Long term, I’d love to see more peppers bred for the cottage-industry lane: small farms, local hot sauce makers, seed savers, weirdos with too many plants, etc. Stuff with a real story and a real use case. This project is basically me trying to make a pepper that grows hard, tastes different, and gives small producers something more interesting to work with than the same five commercial chile types.