A Cook's Garden: How my sweet peppers turned hot

Seeds are like jewels in spring, tiny genetic packages dropped into moist soil, then lovingly tended. After that, the focus is on plant growth: the height of stem, the greenness of leaf, the sweetness of fruit. If you are a reader of plant catalogues, you might even get the impression that seeds are a form of plant debris that interferes with the pleasure of eating grapes, watermelons and cucumbers.

If you are a seed saver, you know better. The seeds of the edible plants you grow give you a critical ownership of next year's crop. Even leaf, stem and root crops can be left in the ground for seed production.

Seeds are also valued if they are, themselves, the crop. Bean seeds allowed to ripen in their pods, whether fresh or dried, are garden mainstays. Pumpkin seeds, roasted, are a popular snack. With corn, the seed is the kernel that we eat.

When you save seeds your thoughts must first turn to their fertilization, lest seeds of various types or varieties cross-pollinate with one another and not come up like the plants that produced them. Some vegetables, such as peas and beans, are self-pollinating, so there is no worry. And normally, cross-pollination does not affect the current year's crop.

The exception is corn, which cross-pollinates with abandon. You must either plant varieties in widely separated plots, or time them to mature at different times, especially if you grow widely divergent corns, such as sweet, field, ornamental and pop.

I'd often wondered if something similar could happen with sweet and hot peppers, since the seeds are often the hottest part of a hot pepper fruit. Last year I was convinced this had happened in the "sweet" pepper row of my garden, when the fruits looked as intended, but were unexpectedly fiery.

I phoned Steve Belavia, vegetable product manager at Johnny's Selected Seeds, to announce my discovery. "Steve," I asked, "is this for real?"

"No," he said, explaining further: When you do a cross in plant breeding, the plant from which you will be saving the seeds is called the "female" by convention. The plant providing the pollen is called the "male." So, in the case of peppers, if a hot pepper acts as a male and pollinates a sweet pepper (the female), the seeds of the female will have hot pepper genes. But capsaicin, which causes heat, is in the placental tissue, not the seeds. So the placenta of the female plant will not have any capsaicin and the fruits will be sweet.

Now I know quite a bit more about pepper sex, but what happened to my sweet, hot fruits?

I have a new theory. It involves a disorder called seed flat cross-pollination. During the confusion and rush of spring planting, the little plant markers labeling the seedlings can migrate from one flat to another. The causes are varied and obscure and, alas, no garden is immune.

Damrosch is a freelance writer and the author of "The Garden Primer."