This suggests that it is highly likely to be a bag of conventional rural seed.
Nowadays, the hybrid seeds commonly found on the market, while high-yielding and disease-resistant, have a fatal flaw—they cannot be stored for replanting.
In the countryside, many elderly people, looking to save money and skeptical of the warnings on seed packaging, would dry and save seeds from the abundant and well-growing hybrid peppers they bought to use for their own planting.
The result is that the second year's plants are often vastly different from the first year's.
They vary in height, have vastly different maturity times, experience a severe drop in yield, and are more prone to diseases, as if they had suddenly transformed from the robust Lu Zhishen to the frail Lin Daiyu.
This is not due to unsuitable soil or some curse placed on the seeds by vendors, but is a natural drawback of hybrid seeds.
