Bicolour Peppers

[windwalkingwolf]

So, dork that I am, I like Star Trek The Next Generation. Well, I like all of them, but I actually own TNG and it's my habit to watch some before I fall asleep--I've seen it often enough that it won't keep me awake to watch, but it also doesn't bore me to tears. In one episode in season 7, there was a bowl of bell peppers on a table, both red and yellow ON THE SAME FRUIT! I got so excited, I went on a mission to find this beautiful mystery pepper. Imagine my surprise to find out it actually didn't exist when TNG was made. It does NOW. Well, sort of. A single plant in a greenhouse of plants treated with a mutagen, turned out like this:

striped_var_Enjoya.jpg (28.81 KiB) Viewed 2496 times

I'm not a big fan of chemicals dicking with my food (I refuse to buy seedless watermelon) but it's so pretty that I went on a hunt for seeds. Unfortunately, they don't exist. All peppers planted from seeds from these peppers turn out yellow, since whatever causes the red core colour to bleed through to the skin, does NOT make it into the seeds. The pepper plant, called Striped Holland or Enjoya, is only reproduced by cloning. So, not only can I not get my hands on the real thing (Mastronardi is not sharing), I lost an hour of sleep trying to track some down, AND I lost track of which episode I saw the offending peppers on, so I cannot even go back to wistfully gaze upon them nor crow on some dorky forum about how the show predicted the future pepper. I feel a failure as both a geek, and a gardener
Further reading: https://the-biologist-is-in.blogspot.co ... epper.html

[labradors]

The original blurb was misleading, saying something to the effect that a dutch guy "found" them in a group of regular peppers which made people think that they would come true from seed. The prospect of growing such a gorgeous pepper was very exciting and numerous people bought the peppers (at great expense) saved the seed, and grew out yellow peppers. Oh the disappointment .

Turns out that these are cloned, but they never came out and said that at the time when they first hit the market .

[kenya]

They are very pretty though, how disappointing.