Can a chili pepper plant be sterile?
This is my 1st post after a few years of extracting all the information I can from this chili pepper head essential forum. 1st off, I live just north of Detroit Michigan so my growing season is not the longest. I start the seeds in January in the basement (warm room where I breed snakes). Then get them in the ground after the last frost, usually around May 1st. As of last weekend I had my 1st little harvest of some of the ripening 1st fruits. Almost all my plants are producing flowers and green fruits, but one!
The 1st pic is of three Pineapple Ghost plants from White Hot Peppers. This is a cross between a Ghost Pepper and Aji Pineapple so it's a Capsicum Chinense x Capsicum Baccatum plant. The plant in the middle is the sterile plant in question. It grew so fast I had to lop off the top foot of the plant to keep it below the window sill and similar to the ones left and right of it. It's about 5 or 6ft tall in the picture after the lop.
The 2nd and 3rd pics show the fruits developing on the plants on either side of the middle sterile plant. The last two pics show some close ups of where the fruits should be starting to grow out of. Everywhere on this plant's branches is only new leaves emerging and no signs of fruit?
Luckily I grow most of my chili peppers plants up against the house on the S.E. and S.W. sides of the house. So I can grow them to about the middle of November or the 1st frost. Honestly they don't do much that last month but ripen up a bit. I'm on the verge of axing this middle sterile plant to give more room for the fruit producing plants to the left and right of it. If it does start producing fruit I believe they will never have time to ripen. That's not a bad thing because I take all the fruits that haven't ripened and make an E.O.S. mix. (End Of Season) This is for all my people that don't like my hotter peppers. I blend all my dried peppers into flakes and use sparingly on food.
So the question I'm asking is; are there chili pepper plants that produce no fruits and are sterile?
Oh by the way I switched my fertilizer from Miracle-gro 24-8-18 to Farmer's secret fruit and bloom booster 2-15-15. This has had no effect yet on the sterile plant. My other plants seem to like the switch when fruits and flowers appear and the plants are big enough.
