Info from catalogue:

Alberto’s Locoto

Now here’s something different. Sometimes known as the Tree Chile or Rocoto, this rare and unusual pepper is unique – it has fuzzy leaves, beautiful purple flowers, and – believe it or not – black seeds. Huge numbers of pretty, 1.5" pendant fruit with thick flesh slowly go from green to deep red.

We grow it as an annual pepper in the usual fashion, and get lots of ripe fruit in October.

(But note you can also grow it as as a perennial, overwintering indoors, & plant can fruit for several years. This is moderately easy – if you can overwinter fuschias or geraniums, you will have no trouble with this beautiful plant. )

We use the fruit to spice up pasta sauces and keep some in vinegar for later in the year. They are pretty hot but it is a warming rather than burning heat, and they have lots of flavour too.

Very, very rare. A different species! Limited stock – order early

Some of this years seed was very kindly grown for us by Owen Smith, who started Future Foods many years ago. As such he was one of the people who tempted us down this path in life, we used to pore over the FF catalogues for fun things to grow on our allotments when we were students. It’s great to have him now working with us to help keep this pepper in circulation.

Order HPAL – 14 seed [OG1/OG2] £2.59