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I'm trying to grow the Carolina Reaper chili pepper.

Searching for "carolina reaper seeds" on Amazon shows quite a few scams. Some reviewers say after waiting months for the pepper to grow, they found out that they were sold common varieties of seed, such as cayenne or banana pepper.

I've also come across listings that sell the whole Carolina Reaper pepper, but in dried form. These should be undeniably the Carolina Reaper because you can clearly see the shape of the vegetable. I'm wondering if the seeds inside dried vegetables are still viable. That is, can they still germinate? I hope the drying process didn't kill the seeds.

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JoJo
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    Not answering the original question, but I found that the inventor of the Carolina Reaper sells the seeds at reasonable prices: https://puckerbuttpeppercompany.com/collections/seeds . Buying directly from the inventor should be the least probability of scam. So looks like I don't need to extract them from dried plants anymore. – JoJo Mar 30 '20 at 21:19
  • You cannot "invent" a plant. You can create new varieties by cross breeding. – Johannes_B Mar 31 '20 at 03:14

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In most cases, yes.

Dehydration by itself does not significantly deteriorate pepper seeds viability. In fact, that's how most people store their seeds for future use.

However, the quality of the seeds might be affected depending on the dehydration process that the pepper went through. If the pepper/seeds got heated to make the dehydration process faster, then there is a chance that some of these seeds aged a bit, thus reducing your germination success rate.

I'd suggest planting all the seeds you can harvest from these peppers, see how many will germinate. You can then only keep the ones you want depending on their health and the number of plants that you'd like.

J.Deschenes
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  • This answer is right, but I just wanted to add that the seeds from the dried Carolina Reapers could easily have been cross-pollinated. Either way, it's still going to be really, really hot. – Brōtsyorfuzthrāx Nov 11 '21 at 02:14
  • @Brōtsyorfuzthrāx , True, there are no guarantee that these plants were isolated. In fact they most likely were not, as they were not grown for the purpose of reproduction. But in the other hand, peppers grown for commercial use are usually growing within all the same species, kinda like a pepper farm, and far less like your backyard garden. So the chances of having pollinators carrying pollens from different species is very slim. – J.Deschenes Nov 12 '21 at 15:22