how to grow a wide world of peppers, with adaptive seeds’ sarah kleeger

SOMEWHERE LIKE MEXICO might come to mind first, if the question asked is about the places that peppers originate from. When the answer you get is “Denmark,” though, things get interesting.

And that’s where the seed for ‘Liebesapfel’—the pepper that began Sarah Kleeger and Andrew Still’s fast-growing Capsicum annuum collection—arrived from, or more specifically, Germany via Denmark.

On their first Seed Ambassadors trip to search out potentially Northern-adapted seed from Europe in 2006, Sarah and Andrew carried ‘Liebesapfel’ (left) back to the New World themselves—though admittedly to their Oregon farm that’s far north of the species’ native range in the Americas. Soon after, when they founded the Adaptive Seeds catalog, the pepper was on their first list of offerings.

‘Liebesapfel’ is the kind of pepper that makes you smile: a ruffled, squat red pimento type that’s sort of the miniature cheese pumpkin of peppers, shape-wise. “It was the first one we got, and we fell in love with it,” says Sarah. No wonder.

The seed, shared along with other treasures by the couple’s friend Søren Holt of Frøsamlerne, the Danish seed-saving organization, had originally been developed by a small seed company in Germany. ‘Liebesapfel’ is very early to ripen, at about 70 days—and that’s no accident.

Those years in Europe helped, and especially in the Danish climate, says Sarah, who describes Denmark as “a bump in the sea where it’s often gray, windy and cool.”

It was good practice for what the pepper would experience in its new homeland with Adaptive Seeds, where it now shares the pages of the 2015 catalog with 16 other peppers, both hot and sweet.

‘Gypsy Queens,’ is one that Andrew is working on “dehybridizing,” which involves sowing seed of a

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