Hello my friends welcome back to the show this is pepper week for

23 we have Calvin Betancourt on the show from pepper geek awesome to have you

on dude thanks for having me I'm happy to be here Pepper Geek, awesome to have you on, dude.

Thanks for having me.

I'm happy to be here.

Yeah, so tell me a little bit, I guess first about Pepper Geek and how you got into it,

because to me, and I understand this now, because I would say I am a pepper head now but in the

past I just grew sort of the standard varieties didn't think too much of it. What do you think it is about

peppers that captivates people and then that's like all they care about? Well that's like all they care about.

Well, that's exactly how we both got my wife and I run Pepper Geek.

That's how we got into it.

There's just so much diversity in across all of the different peppers you can grow from size and flavor, you know, color, shape, and then there's this fifth dimension of spiciness which you literally don't get anywhere else

unless you're growing like black pepper for instance but so there's just levels to it and it just keeps getting more and more crazy as plant

breeders continue to sort of expand on the the genetic pool. Yeah.

Yeah.

What do people not know about peppers?

I mean, I think, you know, I know we're talking about the five different species of peppers.

I think most people might not even know that there are that many let alone of course all the

hundreds or thousands of different cultivars within. Right. So all peppers that you grow

come from the genus Kapsicum and there are actually over 20 different species within that genus but five of them have become domesticated

through you know selective plant breeding over the last several thousand years.

And yeah, most people probably only know of two, maybe three of them,

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