Maui Purple Pepper

This is a pepper I'm growing this year from seeds obtained from Sam Womack/Ozark. It is growing nicely in my Earthboxes and seems to be very prolific. Photo one is of the foliage in general. The second shot is with the leaves pulled back some to see the upward growing peppers. None are showing any sign of red, yet. My understanding is that the peppers, which do ripen to red, are either "very" hot or "extremely" hot. I have not been able to find anywhere that has an approximate Scoville score or capsaicin content.

Sam-- do you use in both purple and red stages? Is red hotter than the purple? A lot or not distinguishable since the pepper is so hot?

David R

David, I don't know how many Scoville units Maui Purple Pepper has either, but it's HOT with good flavor. I notice Reimer Seeds lists it in their on-line catalog in the "very hot" category, along with the various Habaneros and Scotch Bonnet, so it's up there with the big boys!

I use them in both the purple and red stages, can't tell much difference. They stay in the purple stage on the plant much longer than the red stage (not too long after they turn red they start drying up), so I'm much more likely to have purple ones available when I need some "heat".

I have noticed that, like with purple-hulled beans and peas, the purple stage isn't color-fast. The purple ones turn green when cooked or pickled.

Something interesting has happened in the pepper pot. Spontaneous MUTATION, maybe?

In the pot of M.P.P.'s I've grown for many years, individual pepper plants only live for about 3 years (we bring the pot indoors every winter). They drop ripe peppers in the soil which produce volunteers , I help by starting and transplanting seedlings sometimes, and I've been able to keep this going for a long time.

This past winter the nine or so plants in the pot were getting old and looking poorly, so I let them have their last crop then pulled them out. I raised nine new seedlings under lights this spring, then transplanted them into the pot when the weather warmed. Trouble is, the seeds in the soil of that pot sprouted about the same time, volunteer seedlings came up, and there are now about 40 plants bearing their first peppers.

ONE PLANT, a volunteer (very near the edge of the pot, I wouldn't have put a seedling there) is much different from the rest. It's taller than all the others, and it's bearing giant Maui Purple Peppers - about four times larger than normal. Other than size, they appear to be M.P.P.'s in every way.

Peppers cross easily, but I don't think this is a cross. Self-pollination probably happened indoors where there are no other peppers - that's where they last bloomed in the winter. Even if pollination that produced this seed occurred last summer, outdoors, there were no other pepper plants growing within 100 yards or on the same side of the house. An insect could have made the trip, but I think this is more likely a spontaneous mutation which has greatly increased the size of the peppers. I've grown hundreds of M.P.P. plants over the years, and I've never seen this before.

GOOD. I'm thinning out the number of plants in that pot, and I'll be saving seeds from the BIG one - hoping it's self-pollinating and not crossing back with the normal-size plants. I'm onto a nice improvement of the strain here, I think.

Wow! Those are huge compared to the normal MPP. It will be interesting to see if they do grow true.

Ozark, I've grown peppers that look like that when mature, but they weren't MPPs I also had a pot of your MPPs going until last winter, when the unusually cold weather killed them. If I remember correctly you don't grow many hot peppers so it would be hard to get a cross that looks like that anyway. They look like Purple Cayennes. That is really strange but cool.