I get not a lot of people here have been growing their own peppers. I say that because if one goes to their local garden center right now and buys a jalapeño se

I get not a lot of people here have been growing their own peppers. I say that because if one goes to their local garden center right now and buys a jalapeño seedling, puts it in a fairly large pot and gives it a regular dose of N and a daily dose of water and puts outside in the 65-80F weather for the next few months it will produce peppers that are very large and taste pretty similar to the ones in the grocery store. Pick, them just as they reach an couple inches in length before they start to ripen and taste them. Then if one lives in the south, brings it inside next year over the winter, and stop fertilizing it, and reduces watering it to once a week or so, it will again produce peppers next year that will be a lot hotter, but during the summer if you live in somewhere its getting over 100F daily, stop watering it until it starts to drop its leaves and pull it back from the brink of death ever couple weeks over the summer. The last peppers to set in the late spring early summer will only grow to be an inch or so long and the plant will stubbornly refuse to drop them even when they start to shrivel a bit and its lost most of its full size leaves only sprouting 1/4" long leaves during the short periods of recovery when the soil isn't bone dry. Then after a couple months when those peppers get really dark before they start to turn red, pick one and taste it. The second year that plan will produce peppers hotter than probably anything most people have ever tasted. But, the plant will get strong and gnarly, continue to mistreat it for another year or two and what you will have is a pepper that no one can actually eat. In my 20's I found pleasure in sampling top ten lists of hottest hot sauces and peppers, but nothing prepared me for the pepper I pulled off a ~5 year old jalapeño plant I had largely been ignoring all summer long and hadn't been fertilized since it was a seedling. A single bite, and about two chews, and I went into an upper body "hickup" that might be better described as a repeating upper body spasm, and a mouth burn unlike anything I've ever experience before or since. Those are peppers one should pick with gloves. Pepper genetics or even variety aren't the largest dictator of how hot a pepper is. A bigger factor is how they are grown. Give a young plant a 70-80F pleasant environment, plenty of water and nutrient rich soil and they produce lots and lots of peppers that vary only slightly in heat based on their variety. Exactly what a commercial grower will do to maximize yield. Keep a plant on life support for multiple years and it will be an ugly thing, producing only a few peppers that grow slowly and ripen slowly over months, stress it to the point where its largely dropped all its leaves and only has a few small leaves baked daily in full 100F+ sun and it will produce peppers that are by themselves in-edible.