Beautiful, spicy, and flavorful cayenne pepper that starts purple and then passes through salmon and orange on the way to turning a gorgeous red. The tall striking plants are laden with 4-5 inch fruits, which are tasty at all stages, but we prefer the added sweetness of the fully red fruit.
Buena Mulata Pepper was the name on the baby food jar next to the name “Pippin” in the bottom of the deep freezer in William Woys Weaver’s grandmother’s basement, a decade after his plant-loving grandfather’s untimely death. If you’ve heard of the Fish Pepper, this story probably sounds familiar. There were many other seeds besides those of the beautiful, delicious, and now widely-available Fish Pepper in that frozen trove, and many that passed through Horace Pippin’s hands, including this Buena Mulata. Horace Pippin is now a well-known artist who beautifully depicted everyday life, landscapes, religion, WWI, and themes of the injustices of slavery and segregation. In the 1940s, he traded seeds from his friends in the Black catering communities of Philly and Baltimore in exchange for bee sting therapy for WWI arm injury from William Woys Weaver’s grandfather H. Ralph Weaver’s hives. Seeds stay viable longer in the freezer; our heirlooms only survive if someone removes them from storage and places them in soil; and stories only live when they are told.
Days to maturity: 75-80
Minimum Seed Count: 25
“Description courtesy of Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds/rareseeds.com “.
