Carol Hill wrote:

how many varieties of peppers & how close to each other. the reason i
ask is that 1 year i grew sweet and hot next to each other and ended up
with hot sweet and sweet hot , i suspect they may have cross pollenated
(if there is such a happening) anybody recall stuff of this nature?

One year I planted japenos, cayenne and bell peppers. All of the were as
hot or as sweet as they were supposed to be. I saved some seeds from the
cayenne, planted them next year, and got a big surprise.

They had hybridized with the bell peppers. The hybrid plants all had
different heat values. Some had big and fleshy and slightly hot peppers.
Some were thin fleshed and pretty hot. The fruit of every plant was a bit
different in appearance and fire. I kept the seeds of the one I liked
best - a medium hot, relatively thick fleshed type. Unfortunately, it's
offspring weren't very prolific. After that I went back to packaged seeds
for cayenne.