Breed your own chilli and tomato varieties.
Without a lab.
Making a cross is the easy part. Knowing whether it worked is not. Pollen Ledger keeps the record chain that makes an amateur cross defensible: which bud, which pollen, what the weather did, and whether your controls stayed clean.
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The problem it exists for
You cannot tell by looking
An F1 seedling from a successful cross and one from a flower that quietly selfed look the same for months. By the time the fruit tells you, a season is gone.
The answer is a number, and it has an interval
Leave a few emasculated buds unpollinated. If none set fruit, nothing got in. That is evidence, and it can be turned into a confidence figure rather than a feeling.
Three clean controls is weaker than it feels
It moves the estimate from 96% to 96.8%. The app worked that out and now says so, rather than repeating the advice everyone gives.
What it actually does
Tells you whether a cross is worth attempting
Crossability between Capsicum species is published, measured, and wildly uneven. frutescens ♀ × chinense ♂ sets fruit about 15% of the time. annuum ♀ × frutescens ♂ gives you 368 seeds and no seedlings at all, because germination is zero: a pod is not a result.
Direction matters, so the table is an ordered pair. Put the parents the other way round and it is a different cross with a different answer.
Says how many plants you actually need
Chasing a recessive trait in an F2 needs more plants than anyone expects. For a one in sixty-four trait, three of them, at 95% confidence, is 401 plants. That is a bench-space problem, and better to meet it in January than in July.
Reads the weather backwards from the day you pollinated
Pepper pollen is made about a fortnight before the flower opens. A hot spell then destroys it, and nothing you do on the morning will help. A hot spell in the last five days damages the flower instead and leaves the pollen fine, so good pollen is not reassurance.
Two different windows, two different pieces of advice, and the app checks both.
Keeps the pedigree
Four seasons of records add up to a variety instead of a drawer of unlabelled jars. Every line traces back through its crosses to the plants you started with, and the app can tell you when a line is stable enough to name.
Where it says no
This is the part that makes it worth using.
It will not invent a number
A crossability figure either has a published source or the app says it does not know. Unknown is a real answer here, shown as plainly as any other, because a plausible-looking figure tells you to under-plan and being told nobody has measured it tells you to over-plan. One of those mistakes costs you a season.
It will not let you type a Scoville number
You cannot measure one without lab equipment. Ranking pods side by side is less precise-looking and much more honest, so that is what it asks for.
It shows its working, including the weak parts
Every calculation has a page giving the formula, a worked example computed live rather than typed in, the paper it comes from with a link, what it assumes, and which way it is likely to be wrong. Some of it is the author's judgment with nothing measured behind it, and those are labelled as exactly that.
It refuses crosses that need a flow hood
C. pubescens will not cross with the others without embryo rescue. The app says so and stops, rather than letting you spend a summer finding out.
What you need
Enough
- Tweezers and a steady hand
- Small bags or a spare room
- Somewhere to grow: a polytunnel, a greenhouse, a windowsill
- A willingness to label things
Not needed
- Genetic markers
- A growth chamber
- HPLC, or any way to measure capsaicin
- A laboratory of any kind
Two crops so far: chilli and sweet pepper across five Capsicum species, and tomato.
Honestly, where it is up to
It works and it is in use, by one grower. Accounts are not open to anyone else yet, and the permission model that would make that safe is the next piece of work rather than a finished one.
The science is cited and the sources are checked, but none of it has been through peer review. It is one person's reading of the literature, assembled carefully and referenced so that you can check it rather than trust it.
If that sounds like the sort of thing you would want, it is worth watching. If you were hoping for something that tells you confidently what to do, it is not this.