The WikiPepper Seed Library is a stated plan, not yet a running service. This page sets out what the library intends to do and on what terms. It does not yet publish a mailing address, a fee schedule, a members list or shipping instructions, and an earlier version of this page pointed readers to wikipepper.org/library, a page that does not exist. What the site accepts today is data: varieties, corrections and photographs through Contribute.

Why a pepper seed library at all

Commercial catalogs drop varieties that stop selling, and nothing automatically catches them. Public genebanks hold wild Capsicum thinly and domestic landraces thinner still. Private collections hold a great deal of unique material with no backup and no index. A donation-based library aims at that middle ground: material too obscure for a seed company and too undocumented for a genebank, held openly so anyone can grow it and pass it on.

Can I send WikiPepper seeds right now?

No. There is no published intake address and no submission form for physical seed, so anything mailed speculatively would arrive nowhere useful. Two things do help immediately. If you grow a variety missing from the database, send its species, heat range, pod description and photos through the pepper submission form, and the board reviews it for a Universal Pepper Number. If an existing entry is wrong, correct it. A documented entry is what makes a future seed donation findable.

The stated terms, and what has actually been published

Every term this page has carried since it went up appears below, alongside its real status today. None of it runs in software yet, and the numbers are proposals rather than policy.

Stated term.Status today.
Non-commercial, donation-based, open-access repository.Stated intent. It matches how the rest of the site runs, with no ads and no affiliate fees.
Accepts named cultivars, landraces with provenance, F1 and F2 hybrids, and wild or semi-domesticated species.Stated scope. No intake form exists yet.
Seeds dried, clearly labeled, no older than three years.Stated donation standard. Reasonable for orthodox seed, as set out below.
Label each envelope with variety, species, year, origin and donor handle.Stated packing guidance. No address published to send it to.
Members may request seed up to four times a year.Proposal only. The site has accounts, but no membership tier or request queue.
Borrowers grow out, log observations, and return twice the seed borrowed.Proposal only. Nothing tracks loans or returns.
Rare types limited to growers with a documented grow plan.Proposal only. No application process exists.
No intellectual property claims on library material; WikiPepper never sells or licenses seed.Standing principle, consistent with the rest of the site.
Donors credited in a living index.Proposal only. No such index exists.
Long-term vault holding rare and wild types for 15 to 20 years or more.Aspiration. No page describes a facility, equipment or a germination-test schedule.

How long do stored pepper seeds stay viable?

Pepper seed is orthodox, meaning it survives drying and cold, so storage buys real time. The Chile Pepper Almanac puts well-stored seed at two to four years of good viability in a refrigerator at 35 to 40°F, with a slow decline after that. Its authors report germinating ten-year-old seed, patchily. Genebanks do far better by going colder and drier. The FAO Genebank Standards hold base collections at minus 18°C plus or minus 3, at 15 percent relative humidity, and call for regeneration once viability falls to 85 percent of the initial figure.

Two practical consequences for a donor. Dry the seed properly before it goes in an envelope, because a home freezer wrecks seed that still holds moisture. Send seed from a recent harvest rather than the back of a drawer. Our seed storage guide covers desiccants, containers and testing.

Provenance is the part that matters

An unlabeled envelope of small red pods is worth very little. The same envelope marked with the species, the year, where the parent plant grew and whether it stood near other peppers is worth a great deal. Wild and semi-wild types cross readily, and a pod picked off a plant that flowered beside three other varieties may carry none of the traits you think it does. Isolate the mother plant, bag a few flowers, or at minimum record the distance to the nearest other pepper. The isolation guide lays out the distances, and the breeding guide covers controlled crosses.

Seed sharing and the law

Noncommercial seed sharing ran into state seed laws in the United States a decade ago, when regulators applied commercial labeling, testing and permitting rules to community seed libraries. Four states fixed it in statute. Minnesota, Nebraska and Illinois went first, and California followed in September 2016 when Governor Brown signed AB 1810, which states that the California Seed Law does not reach noncommercial seed sharing through libraries or exchanges. Other states have not legislated, so a library operating across state lines should check the seed law where it sits.

Why international seed donations are hard

Two rules bite. APHIS excludes pepper and tomato seed from the Small Lots of Seed permit that covers most hobby imports into the United States, a response to tomato brown rugose fruit virus. Pepper seed entering the country needs a phytosanitary certificate with an additional declaration and virus testing behind it, whether the packet holds 20 seeds or 20 kilos. Separately, Capsicum never made Annex I of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources, the list that lets genebanks move material under one standard agreement. Potato and eggplant are on it; peppers are not. Cross-border pepper germplasm therefore travels under bilateral agreements and national access law.

What is worth collecting first

Wild and semi-wild material, and landraces with a story attached. Those disappear from the seed trade fastest and appear in public collections least, a pattern our wild species overview sets out in detail. Regional bird pepper populations are a good example: Chiltepin stands in Sonora, Texas and Arizona differ from one another, and each valley's plants carry their own history. Our tepin and pequin page maps the names. Save that seed now, label it properly, and it will have somewhere to go when the library opens.

Sources & Further Reading