I used to collect all sorts of Solanum family edible plants and I grew a great form of Cocona. I like them because they handle full sun better than most of the rest of the clan. I found that if I start the seeds very early indoors and get them out in early May I could get a crop before first frost. The fruit has an odd and not so special flavor raw but when cooked with a splash of lemon juice and some sugar it takes on all sorts of tropical fruity flavors. It didn't seem to matter how much sugar either. If you put a lot of sugar it would cook down to a decent jam without needing to add any pectin. A jam that tasted like tangerine mixed with mango.

Because they will cross with other relatives that I grow I tend to focus on them every other year in order to keep my seed lines pure. I don't have any in the garden this year.

Keep in mind that this type of tropical eggplant is very variable. There are some that look like small bell peppers and some that are pingpong ball round, some are reddish orange and others that are bright yellow. I've seen them be meaty and thick walled and juicy and thin skinned. In some parts of South America they treat them as a fruit and in others they treat them like a vegetable. Everybody cooks them, they don't have enough flavor when raw. They can catch any disease or pest that affects eggplants/tomatoes/peppers/potatoes. They can also be bug magnets in the winter when you store them indoors or in a greenhouse.

When I visited Colombia they were in season and the locals like to cross breed them with the related 'Lulo' to get a better flavored juice. I'm growing Lulo this year but they hate high heat so they are not happy this summer.

Here are some photos from the last Cocona crop.

Thanks trianglejohn! Very encouraging and informative post. Those look great. Did it produce a lot of fruit?

I got my seeds from baker creek. The picture on the packet shows a kind of red looking fruit.

I went out side this morning and something has eaten the top of my cocona plants. I'm going to re-start some just in case these don't recover.

I saw those offered in his catalog. At some point I plan on buying them to compare them to mine. There used to be a guy in Hawaii offering seeds from a virtually seedless variety from Peru. He ran out of those seeds but got me the ones I grow now.

Eggplant greens are pretty toxic to mammals so I doubt they will be coming back for seconds. The plants should recover eventually. They are super easy to start from cuttings - I usually snip cuttings from my best producers in the late fall and overwinter them in my greenhouse.

Hi trianglejohn. My cocona plants didn't make it. Something took the tops off all three, and they died, so I restarted some and am keeping them inside until next spring. Here's a pic of one (actually 2 seedlings in this container).

I never found out what took the tops off the first ones. They were small, so maybe they weren't very toxic at that stage. Here's the seed packet I bought. Looks like my cocona fruit will be red with yellow flesh. Have any idea what these would taste like?

I'm hoping for fruit next summer.