The flowers of chili peppers, known botanically as capsicum, appear in the spring and summer, several weeks or months before the peppers are ready for harvest. There are more than a hundred varieties of chili peppers under cultivation worldwide but the flowers of the chili pepper species are rather uniform with the only possible difference being the number of petals.
Instructions
1. Inspect your garden or soil for small white flowers in the spring and summer that grow individually atop a short, thin green flower stalk and attach to the thicker plant branch near a green leaf. There may be several sets of flower stalks along the terminal end of the plant branch.
2. Chili flowers are mostly star-shaped with five to seven triangle petals. More than five petals is not that common; although the flowers are no longer distinctly star-shaped and the petals are spaced roughly evenly around the eye, the shape is the same.
3. Look at each individual petal to see that they radiate away from the eye of the flower and taper to a point. The field of the petal near the eye can be very lightly specked in a pale greenish yellow hue.
Tags: chili peppers, flowers chili, plant branch, spring summer