It's easier to get pure seeds by issolating a branch or plant with netting,
Paint strainer etc.

Bees can/will hit every flowering plant in a normal sized yard, so you pretty much have to bag the blossoms/branch/plant to be certain of 100% uncrossed seed.

I'm also going to bag pods/blossoms this year. This is how I'll do it:
1. Make bags out of tulle fabric (cheap, abundant, perfect for what I need). I'll add stretch bands for open/close.
2. Bag the pods before they open up.
3. Maybe try some manual pollination (carefully, to not cross).
4. Once peppers arrive, take off the bags and leave a string indicating that the pod has pure seeds in it.
5. When pepper has reached maturity, remove the seeds and let them air dry.
6. Sometime around Dec/Jan, do some germination testing. If everything turns out ok (70-80% germination rate), distribute to co-workers and perhaps SASE/trade in this forum :)

Anyway, that's the plan. Did not get around to it last year. Will hopefully make it a reality this year.

You can also put a drop of white glue on the unopened bud.When it self pollinates the pod will have a drop of dried glue on the end.
Watering will wash off/soften the glue so be careful until you have pods.

The genarally accepted distance plants need to be separated is 500 ft. so the above suggestions are a good solution.

john

You can also isolate by time. The first blossom to open will be pure because there is no other blossom. mark the blossom.

You can make a frame box. cover with cloth and cover the plant. SSE uses this technique. They used to have pictures of the setup. Ask to see some pictures.

with this clever trick you can also trap bees inside the box.

If you find a pepper with only a few seeds like less than 10, the pepper must be self pollenated. These peppers usually stay very small. Sometimes have only 2 or 3 seeds inside. not many but pure.

You can pollenate some indoors before taking them outdoors. There are no bees indoors so no cross pollenation. mark the peppers.

You can also save your seeds separate from each pepper. If your pepper was bad you can not use those in the package again. Or if they are good the rest are probably good. If you mix a lot of peppers together you are almost sure to get seeds from at least one pepper that is crossed.

Not saying anything that hasn't been said, but since I only need/want 50-ish seeds of almost anything I just cheesecloth and string flowers before they open...wait a few days...open to find a little pepper starting. It's literally just a few minutes "work" to do 2-3 flowers.

I'm collecting 200+ seeds this year for a pepper I'm breeding, though (3"-ish super-sweet chili). I'm ready to release into the wild depending on how seed the I've passed out this year comes true to type. Still, the work shouldn't be more than 10-15 minutes no matter what.

Most of the time peppers don't need the isolation and will come true to type because they just simply love to self-pollinate before insects get to them. Still...if you really want to make sure the work vs. assurance isn't that much of a trade-off.

Can you go into more detail about the cheesecloth and string procedure? I am trying to read lots of different methods. I hope to keep seed on at least 10 pepper types, as well as a few tomatoes. Thanks, Kathy in Texas

Cover a limb section or just a bit over the flowers and tie it off loosely enough to close it up, but not tight enough to restrict the stem.

You don't need to fashion it precisely around the flower to avoid anything. You can go beyond the flower and tie onto a deeper part of the stem if you wish. You don't need to make the cheesecloth tight over the flower (it's preferred to give it a little bubble of air space).

Thank you. I assumed this was about how it was done but want to be able to share seeds with reasonable certainty that they are pure. Kathy

Walmart carries drawstring net sachet bags 4"x6" or 5"x7" in 12 packs for around $4. You can find them in the party/wedding/crafts section.

At what point is it too late to cover a section?

Watch the flower buds until they get plump (about to open)...bag them then.

2-4 days later you're good to go. Never hurts to lightly shake the limb a little once it opens, but it's not necessary.

If you "mess it up" (it's a lot easier than it sounds...almost so easy it seems like it shouldn't be that easy) you can wait for another plump flower bud about to open.

This is best done in the morning, but it's not going to hurt anything if you pick a bud to bag at any point of the day/evening.

Hey Guys; It is a lot easier to build cages out of wood or CRW and covered with ReMay (Row Cover). Although Pepper plants are inbreeding it is always better to select from several plants as opposed to one. I find I get better results from harvesting from several plants that are extremely productive. I do this with tomatoes as well. I consistantly get quality plants from this method.

Is inbreeding, assuming you mean from the same plant fertilizing itself, a problem? Kathy

No, inbreeding is not a problem, it is prefered. Varieties are stable homozygotes and any deleterious recessive genes were weeded out long before the varieties were stabilized.

Hi there. Does tulle bagging (or similar methods) actually guarantee prevention of cross pollination - I mean what about wind pollination? I don't know much about pollination but I think pollen is microscopic in scale, so getting through the tulle mesh should be no problem for it.

Does anyone know a method for 100% CP negation for the home gardener (don't have 500+ feet to work with here)?

And any idea about how to stop CP for plants that rely on wind/insect pollination (don't have complete/perfect flowers)?

I heard about taking a paint brush and transferring pollen from one flower of the same species/variety to another.

Any help will be greatly appreciated. Thank you!!

Peppers are not wind pollinated, so you don't have to worry about pollen blowing through the mesh. Pollen for insect-pollinated plants is heavy and sticky to stick to the pollinators. And peppers have perfect flowers so if they don't get insect-pollinated, they can pollinate themselves.

Crops that are wind pollinated (corn for example) or that don't have perfect flowers (squash and melons for example) are trickier. Right now the way I'm handling it is only growing one species of each at a time (the neat thing about squash is there's four different species, so you can grow four different varieties at once and they won't cross), but if you want to get fancy and grow more than one variety of each species at a time, there's things you can do with bagging or taping blossoms and hand pollinating.

But you really don't have to worry about that with peppers. Just keeping the bees away somehow is sufficient.

Also, I assume that since there's more than one species of pepper, you can do like what I'm doing with squash and plant one variety of each species with no protection and be fine.

I have heard there can be some cross-species hybrids, but I'm assuming those are rare enough that I won't worry about it. After all, if cross-species hybridization was common, you wouldn't have separate species anymore.

The cheese cloth method mentioned earlier will work perfectly! Good luck