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Male & Female Sweet /bell Peppers ?

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Chipchopper | 10:07 Mon 08th Jun 2015 | Gardening
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I heard a snip-it of information today, which sounds like nonsense to me, but is it strictly true ?
Apparently the peppers that have 4 bumps on the bottom are the females and the taller, thinner ones with only 3 bumps on the bottom are males.
Both contain seeds but the "males" have fewer.

A good conversation topic at dinner parties and BBQs but what evidence is there to support such a claim ?
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Myth. The number of lobes is related to the specific variety of pepper. There are varieties of peppers that produce 2, 3-4, or 3-5 lobed peppers.
10:35 Mon 08th Jun 2015
Myth. The number of lobes is related to the specific variety of pepper. There are varieties of peppers that produce 2, 3-4, or 3-5 lobed peppers.
Utter nonsense. Pepper flowers are dioecious....they have both male and female sex organs. How could the "male" fruit have seeds ?

If anyone wants to see a good example of seperate sex flowers (monoecious), look at a begonia. You will see a large female flower (with a seed pod at the bottom) surrounded by a pair of smaller male flowers.
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Of course, it was a huge myth, probably started my a chef, who just used it as an aid to select the type needed for a particular dish, but it did get a lot of people going, on the internet.
The only part about this myth that, I think might be true, is that the ones with more lobes having more seeds, this, I think would stand to reason, purely because, they are bigger and therefore likely to have more segments inside, to which the seeds are attached.
Question Author
Love them stripes DT, they must be sergeant peppers :-)
very good!

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