Photo: Michael Wolf — CC BY 2.5 · source
Survives zone 8 through 9
Harvest calendar
Best planted in early spring after your last frost, or in fall before the ground freezes, depending on your climate.
Sweet, juicy, mild flesh eaten fresh as a dessert fruit — a cross between melon and cucumber; skin and soft seeds edible. Care: Winter protection — mulch, fleece, or a warm wall. ⚠ Ripe fruit only — like its tomato and potato relatives, unripe fruit and the foliage contain solanine.
- Hardiness
- Zone 8–9
- Habit
- Shrub
- Edible part
- Seed, Fruit
- Ripens
- Summer–autumn
- Mature size
- Sprawling half-woody perennial 0.6–1 m tall and as much across; excellent in a large container
- Light
- Full sun
- Soil pH
- 6.0–7.0
- Environment
- Montane
- Native range
- The Andean highlands of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, where it has been cultivated so long that no wild population is known — a domesticate without a wild home, like maize.
- Status
- Cultivated
- Years to fruit
- 1 yr
- Growth speed
- Fast — a rooted cutting fruits within five to six months
- Spacing
- 75 cm (30 in) apart — about 1.8 per m² (1.7 per 10 sq ft)
- Leaf shape
- Alternate, simple to slightly lobed, lance-shaped 5–15 cm, soft and slightly hairy, on sprawling half-woody stems that root where they touch the ground.
- Root system
- Shallow and fibrous, mostly in the top 30 cm, with stems rooting readily where they lie — good for propagation, poor for drought, and the reason pepino needs steady water and dislikes a windy site.
- Fruit description
- A smooth ovoid berry 10–20 cm long in the best forms, cream to golden-yellow with the purple streaks the plant is known for. The flesh is pale, juicy and mild — melon crossed with cucumber, more refreshing than sweet — and the skin and small soft seeds are both edible. It bruises easily and does not travel.
- Propagation
- Cuttings, almost always: they root in a week or two and keep the variety exactly. Seed is fertile but variable, and a cutting-grown plant fruits months sooner.
- Pollination
- Self-fertile
The edible parts listed above are a starting point, not a field guide. Identify a plant with certainty — ideally against a local authority — before eating any part of it, and read the full disclaimer. Spotted something wrong? Report it.
Growing guide
Fertilizing. Benefits from fertile soil enriched with well-rotted manure at planting, plus a balanced fertilizer such as 5-10-10 during the growing season; overly rich soil pushes leafy growth at the expense of fruit.
How it spreads. Sprawling, shrubby habit that stays in a loose clump (spreading roughly 4 feet wide) rather than spreading by runners or self-seeding; often trained on a trellis or grown in a hanging basket.
Growing tips. Frost-tender: established plants are cut back by temperatures near -3°C (27°F), though a well-mulched root crown can resprout in mild winters. Very easy to propagate from stem cuttings, the standard way to overwinter stock indoors. Watch for whiteflies, aphids, and spider mites.
Grow journal
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