Aji lemon is a great tasting pepper with a nice heat. Tepins are small but great flavor and heat. Any Baccatum would be great pepper for you to grow. Maybe birgit locoto. Orange Thai's are another great pepper.

But you must grow the Sepia Serpent. It is cross between douglah and a scorpion

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But orange thais and aji lemos you will love and are easy to grow :)

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see here's the thing. I grow 7pots and bhuts, and I love them. the trick is I don't ever eat a whole pod. heck, I won't even eat a whole habanero. with the superhots if you wanna use a whole pod, use it one in a pot of stew (the origin of the name "7pot" is that the Trinidadians would say one pepper is enough to add spice to 7 pots of stew). go ahead and grow the ones you originally planned to make. when I first started growing, I thought a jalapeno was quite hot, and a habanero was ridiculous. now I love my superhots. it's all a matter of exposure, and building up a tolerance. many of the superhots have incredibly complex flavors that you just can't get from milder peppers. so it's not a matter of building up a tolerance for the sake of showing off, it's about building up a tolerance so you can enjoy some of the best tasting peppers on the planet.

if you want peppers hotter than the ones you currently grow, but not up in the superhot range, I suggest serrano, thai peppers, and tabasco. I grow all 3, they're not ridiculously hot, and they're good tasting peppers. not as good tasting as my brain strain 7pot, but still quite tasty.

ROMY6,,,,are you sure you are not trying to kill me?? hahahhaa...those sound like danger to me !! LOL

Judo and Peppers....Thank you. I appreciate the information. I will try them very very carefully.

Chocolate habanero is one of the better tasting Habanero's, I would add that to your list as well as Fatalii among those already mentioned. Eating a pod whole is almost impossible, especially the super hots, but as stated above you can build up a tolerance to the heat. I have eaten hole pods, I don't recommend it. But adding a bit here and there to a dish is great for flavoring the dish with great pepper flavor. Turning into a sauce or powder prolongs the use of the peppers as well as the jelly and relish you mentioned, its a good idea to do that especially with the hotter varieties. If you would like seeds for the Chocolate Hab shoot me an email I will gladly send you seeds.

Mark

for me this is how it went....I am one who grew up with zero spice in my parents house. For me a jalapeno was insane, but later in life, as I settled down and started gardening, I really enjoyed pepper plants people had, so I started growing them, and If I was going to grow them, I was going to eat the darn things....that was say 12 years ago. These days, I am not a very good barometer to whether a pepper, sauce, or meal is hot/spicy. The tolerance builds and the flavors start to emerge. Now my wife knows that if I say it is nothing, then she tries herself rather than believe me, but I am glad to say that after all these years, she can handle way more heat than in years past....yes, grow what you want and just start by eating a little at a time, and over time you will wonder why you were so wimpy in the past----this from an EX-WIMP....YUM PEPPERS

One has to try to develop a tolerance and liking to hot peppers and it will take years. A Hindu infant nursed by its mother is introduces to it, b,c mother's milk is hot and spicy.

To try to develop some sort of tolerance, start from the bottom. For example, I would start eating very young Jalapeno, with no hear or very little. As they grow bigger, get more heat gradually. You keep trying them, plain, in sandwich, chopped into omlett ...Try eating Jal pickles, ..

Stop using Green Bells: Instead use Poblano, Cubanelle, Gypsy, Anaheim, .. They all have very mild heat (some no heat)
The hottest pepper that I plant and use is Habanero, which is about 2 to 3 time as hot as Jalapeno. and serrano.

I use hot pepper (fresh , dried, hot sauce ) with just about everything I cook and eat. It like like using salt for most people. Often I do not even use salt.

CAPSAISIN addiction:
It has been researched that consumption of capsaisin (and other oils in hot peppers) causes some form of addiction to it and it is also a mood enhancer. That may explain why once you get started on it , you'll be hooked: LOL

seysonn, a hab has more like 20-50x the heat of a jalapeno, depending on which hab we're talking about. with that said, a jalapeno is still hot to me. if I eat a whole one, I still feel it. I'm not immune to lower levels of hotness just because I can eat ridiculously hot stuff.

I don't eat lunch or dinner without something spicy. and now that Tim (peppernovice) sent me a jar of his strawberry moruga jam, I've been eating hot stuff for breakfast too.

Romy, what's a fellow florida chilihead gotta do to get seeds for that sepia serpent? that thing looks awesome.

I agree with everyone on the thai and pequin recommendations. They have a nice red pepper flavor, less of a fruity/musty flavor than the habaneros .. which could be interesting for your jams.. although the habaneros could also make some interesting ones. I've seen a lot on these forums pairing them with peaches/apricots. The pequin are pretty tiny too, i bet they would make for good little bursts of heat in the jam. They certainly do on eggs

otherwise you have a very wide set of options for medium-hot types from a variety of regions.. these two websites have tools for searching peppers by heat level, region, types, etc.. thechileman.org, and chileplants.com

in terms of heat handling, i'm not sure there is a common denominator for people on these forums, besides being a little ehm, obsessed? having never had a background in growing anything, i can say its easy to get roped into the pepper growing either for all the varieties/flavors, or eating/preparing the increasing heat levels.... so, be careful, you might be reading a similar post in a couple years, smiling to yourself when you realize you've become one of the crazy pepper growers :)

good luck! -E

Thank you Everyone for the great information. I really appreciate it !

Seysonn, I added anaheims from the health food store to the pepper jelly because the jalapenos from my garden were not very hot for some reason, and it seemed to add more heat to my 2nd batch.

Chilemilio: I am already addicted to gardening, so I am thinking I will have a slight addiction to growing peppers now as well.=) My husband and I LOVE hot pepper jelly. I heard that hot and sweet peppers can cross pollinate if planted too closely together, and therefore the jalapenos may not have much heat,,,and I had them planted right next to my sweet peppers. Does anyone know if this is possible?

Anyhow, I love this Hot Pepper forum already, I will be hanging around for a while.

Thank you !!

No, you had it right the first time. We are crazy. Fortunately, though, we are rarely dangerous.

Plants can cross-pollinate, but that affects only the seeds (and next year's plants), not the fruits. Some jalapenos are indeed just plain wimpy.

I recommend that you add fatalii as your "test superhot", though it's not really a superhot. Bonnie Plants sells them as Habanero ("World's Hottest Habanero") though they aren't really a hab. Bright yellow with a citrus flavor that will go splendidly in jelly. Since sugar seems to moderate heat, you can actually go overboard with t3h Hotness and not have an inedible product.

Go hotter than you think you will be able to handle, then cut or cut back if you actually get something (the product, not the pepper) that is too hot for you to handle.

Enjoy!

Dennis

Is there some that you can suggest that are hotter than jalapeno, but not so hot I have to call the fire department when consuming. ???

I've had some really hot jalapenos that caught me by surprise before, just saying, there ARE some hot ones out there.

I see you're in zone 4 Maine, bear in mind a lot of these peppers are long and very long season plants when it comes to bearing mature fruit. Chileplants.com is an excellent site to research and learn a lot about chiles. Example:

Here is a link that might be useful: Baccatuum_mid season

Another example:

Here is a link that might be useful: Chinense_early season

Sorry, can't help myself, I love CCN's search layout; on a scale of:

sweet
mild
medium
hot
very hot
extremely hot

....there are no Jalapenos listed beyond the 'hot' category, so, you may be ready to take the plunge into the 'very hot' realm. CCN search for 'very hot' 'early season':

(I believe the pequin has already been suggested, I grew Limon first time this season, excellent chile and hotter than Jalapenos, good possibility for you)

Here is a link that might be useful: very hot_early season

Habaneros are the only hot peppers I am growing this year, although I plan to add 2-4 tabasco pepper plants next year just for fun and to experiment.

Habaneros are my favorite pepper. I would never eat a whole pod, but I cook them in lots of things. Lately I have been making them in salsa, but I also add them to soups, stews, chili, and other things. I even chop them up to put on hot dogs! You can use them to add a little zing to a soup or lots and lots of heat to a chili. And they add more to the taste of a dish than just their heat. I find they have a fruity flavor, with almost a savory quality to it. And you can even find a recipe for habanero cookies (complete with instructions to remove the heat!) on allrecipes.com.

I would probably grow habaneros even if I did not like to eat them because they are also pretty plants! I really enjoy looking at them outside with their little pods hanging from a stem and watching them turn colors as quickly as they do.

So I really recommend growing habanero peppers! They are wonderful plants in so many ways! They are very worth trying!

But I share the original poster's feelings about the bhut jolokia and others. Maybe I need to meet a lover of those peppers in person who can show me why they love them so. :)

Angie

Great information, thank you !! I actually just made a batch of Cayenne pepper relish....using only cayenne peppers. It is very spicey, but I think I will like it. I had the opportunity to pick 2 baskets full from a friends garden who has an over abundance of them. I still have a full basket and one half left. I want to dry them, but they are still green so I am assuming it cannot be done properly unless they are fully ripened in the red stage. Any suggestions?