How we record heritage

Every pepper in Capsi has a Heritage section. Tap Explore and you get a family portrait: parents above, this pepper in the middle, anything bred from it below. Tap a relative and they move to the middle. Grandparents are one tap away, not a second row of tiles.

That picture is easy to trust. Too easy. Seed shops, forums, and pepper pages copy each other's parentage until a rumour looks like fact. We treat heritage the way we treat heat: we still show what people name, and we say how much it deserves.

How a pepper gets made

Not every pepper is a cross of two named varieties. When Capsi stands behind the story, a pill under the portrait names the type. Tap the ⓘ for the full note. Here is the short version.

• Landrace. A pepper shaped by a place and the people who farmed it, not by crossing two named varieties. Ghost is a landrace. So is Aji Limón. Plants in a field still differ a little; that mix is the crop. Plant seed from the fruit and you get this kind of pepper again. Save from many plants, not one.

• Selection. One trait kept from an existing pepper. A chocolate habanero is still a habanero, grown on for brown ripe fruit. One parent. Nobody crossed it with something else. Save seed once the trait holds.

• F1 hybrid. The first children of a planned cross. The plants match. The packet is that pairing, remade each year. Seed from your own fruit is the next generation, not this variety. Buy the packet again if you want the same pepper.

• F2+. After an F1, until the line holds. You grow the hybrid, save seed, plant it. Heat, colour, and shape split down the row. Do that again: F3, F4, same idea. We call all of that F2+. It is not a finished variety yet. Save seed only if you are hunting a new line.

• Stabilized. A cross that was selected for years until seed grows the same plant again. Bhutlah started as Ghost × 7 Pot Douglah; the years in between are how a hybrid became a variety you can keep. Stabilized means the line holds. It is not the same word as heirloom, which is about age and history. Save seed.

• Backcross. You want most of one pepper, plus one thing from the other. Cross, then send the children back to the parent you want to keep. Mostly the original, plus that piece. A method, not a generation number. Save seed once the line holds.

What the tiles mean

A parent is not always another Capsi page.

• A photo and a name. That pepper is in Capsi. Tap it to see its family.

• Not in Capsi yet. A real named pepper we do not have a page for. We keep the name so the family stays honest. We do not invent a page.

• Not a named variety. Words a breeder or listing used: a place, a type, slang, secret stock. Honest as a description. It will not get its own pepper page.

• Unknown. This was a parent. Nobody gave a name we can use. We do not invent one. That is not “we didn’t look,” and it is not a landrace.

We do not guess family from similar names. Aji Limón is not a lemon-colored Aji Limo. They are different peppers. If a pepper already goes by another name, like Lemon Drop for Aji Limón, that is the same pepper, not a new one.

How much to trust the picture

When Capsi stands behind the family, you see the type pill: Landrace, Selection, F1 hybrid, and so on. Those parents and children are the ones we stand behind.

When shops name a pairing and nobody serious confirms it, we still draw it. The pill says Unconfirmed. Same idea as a vendor heat figure: you can see it; Capsi has not signed it.

When serious sources disagree on the parents, or on whether it is a hybrid at all, the pill says Disputed. We draw what can be shown. We do not pick a winner.

Unconfirmed and disputed pairings stay on this pepper. They are not added as children on the parents’ pages. Looking around is not settling the family.

Sources sit under the portrait. Primary is a breeder, a university, a paper. Catalog is a serious reference. Shop is a seed listing. A shop that calls something a seasoning chile from Peru, with no parents named, can support a landrace. A shop that lists Ghost × Habanero cannot, by itself, make Capsi stand behind that cross.

When we don’t know

If we have not looked yet, Heritage says we don’t have a documented family for this pepper yet.

If we looked and it is not a landrace, not a selection, and not a named cross, that is also a result: nothing reputable documents a pedigree.

Empty is honest. We would rather tell you we don’t know than invent two parents from a similar name.

Reading Heritage

On a pepper’s page, Heritage leads with one sentence, like Bhutlah is a stabilized line from Ghost Pepper and 7 Pot Douglah, then the parents you can open, then anything bred from it.

Tap Explore for the walk. Tap a pill for what that word means. Tap a source to read the citation. The research note under the portrait is why we recorded it this way.

That’s the whole idea: not a prettier rumour chart, but a family you can actually walk, with the evidence sitting next to it.