Strange Growing Season in Southeastern Pennsylvania

[ChiliDude 0]

Buongiorno Miei Amici,

 

Mi dispiace, parlo un po' italiano ma molto male. Devo scrivere in inglese.

 

We have had the most unusually bad production of peperoncini this year. The plants did not start developing pods until after the middle of August. There were very few pods this year. The pods that did develop did not start to ripen until after 25Sep08 while my wife and I were visiting her relatives in the Chicago, Illinois area. It has become unseasonably cold here with morning temperatures between 28 and 36 degrees Fahrenheit.

 

I harvest some peperoncini today. Most of them are still green. Five of my plants were 2nd generation plants that resulted from C. chinense x C. annuum crosspollination in 2006. I was unaware of the crosspollination until last year, 2007, when I found a single plant that was supposed to produce Chocolate Habanero pods, but it was producing pods that were orange and looked like wrinkled jalapenos.

 

I sent an email to Dr. Paul Bosland, Director of Chile Research, at New Mexico State University about this phenomenon. He replied and thanked me for the information because he said that he has told people that crosspollination between the 2 species occurs very often. My email verified that

 

Each of the five plants this year produced pods of different phenotypes. One plant produced pods that looked like small peperone di Senise, but the pods are piccante forte. I received the original peperone seeds from Marco X, and those seeds produced some very nice pods. Grazie tante, Marco. My wife's paternal grandparents were immigrants to the USA from Basilicata. I wanted to plant some peperoni in honor of her grandparents from that region.

 

Some of my neighbors also had the same experience with poor peperoncini production this year. One neighbor also has 7 fig trees. Only 1 tree produced figs this year, and only 3 figs. Something very strange is happening here in SE Pennsylvania. All the people here with whom I spoke about peperoncini production had similar experiences as have I.

 

Cordialissimi saluti,

 

ChiliDude

[Lonewolf 18,147]

Hi Chilidude, welcome back!

 

Which is the cause of the strange growing season? Low temperatures, too rain or something else ?

Or did you have some problems with bees' disease or something similar?

 

We also had a strange season in Italy; it started with two months (May/June) of continuous rain and we were about three weeks late in comparison with 2007 (even in South Italy).

Fortunately in July and August there were very high temperatures and almost no raining day, so plants recovered lost time and we had good crops.

Still weather is quite good now and pods of second flowering are now ripening.

 

However, climate looks strange, even for heavy storm; many members lost plants or crops due to hail-storm or strong rain-storm.