Chilli Pepper Machu Pichu An exciting new Capsicum Chinese cultivar from Peru. The elongated, slightly wrinkled chillies have a rich flavour and a fairly mild to medium pungency. The chillies dry well and make an excellent chilli powder, but can equally well be used fresh. The upright growing plants are particularly handsome with dark green chillies maturing to rich chestnut brown and are ideal for growing in containers on the patio where they remain compact and crop early.Grown in the open ground the plants are much larger and very productive, but the chillies ripen fairly late in the season. This Capsicum baccatum cultivar is highly ornamental, but also a very good culinary variety. The attractively marked flowers are followed by erect conical chillies which ripen from light purple through white, to orange and finally bright red.The chillies are quite fleshy and ideal for using fresh, having a fairly mild heat and a sweet fragrant flavour. They make an excellent sweet chilli sauce. Sow indoors from January to April, in soil 0.5 cm deep, in separate pots if possible. Pot on in late May outdoors either in containers as patio plants or in a well protected site. Peppers can be slow to germinate so allow up 35+ days. Compost should not be too moist to prevent the seeds from rotting. All chilli peppers are very sensitive to the cold.
