Hot Paper Lantern Pepper
Habanero-type peppers are their own species of pepper, capsicum chinense. Most of them are grown in extreme humidity and heat in tropical areas, requiring a longer growing season than the most common pepper species, capsicum annum. You see large amounts of habanero-types in places like the Caribbean and the tropical mountains of northeastern India (this is where ghost peppers come from). In tropical areas, peppers are long-lived plants, forming small trees that can live for several years. In areas with freezing weather in the winter, peppers are grown as annual plants, limited in the spring by cold soils and killed by the first frost in the fall. While our low-lying valley in Colorado is a great place to grow peppers, habanero-type peppers can be challenging to grow outdoors.
Enter the Hot Paper Lantern pepper! This is the quickest-maturing habanero-type pepper available in the United States. Hot Paper Lantern is open-pollinated, meaning we can save our own seeds each year. Famed pepper breeder Janice Eckert bred the pepper using traditional plant breeding methods of controlled pollination and selection for specific traits. In our growing climate, we seed the peppers mid-March on a heat mat in our greenhouse, transplant them outdoors the first week of June, and harvest ripe peppers beginning in early October. As our growing season gets longer with climate change, we are harvesting more and more ripe peppers. These are the key ingredient in our red hot sauces, paired with Thai peppers and a fruit or vegetable base like apricot, peach, pumpkin, or black raspberry.
We’ve saved tons of seeds for local seed companies, and seeds should be available through our friends at Vibrant Earth Seeds for the spring growing season of 2025!