All live pepper plants are grown from isolated seeds from trusted sources, if not from Black Hand Pepper Company's seed stock.
Description/Taste

The Datil pepper is the “first Capsicum chinense to be grown for profit in the United States” since its arrival in St. Augustine. It is normally grown in back-yard gardens by families in northeastern Florida. The seeds are scarce to obtain commercially, so are typically available through local farmers or on the Internet. Local families typically grow the peppers in small batches and are then used for their local restaurants and businesses. Datil peppers do not last when fully ripe, so the optimal stage to buy them is when they are green. Datil peppers are grown in similar ways to hot and mild peppers. A frequent pest of the datil peppers are pepper weevils.
 
Species: Capsicum Chinense  
Heat Level: Similar Scoville heat rating to the Habanero pepper, ranging between 100,000 and 300,000
Type: Hot
Origin: United States, Florida
Days to Harvest: 60 - 90 Days
 
Interesting facts about the Datil Pepper
The origin of the datil pepper is unknown. Numerous theories and legends abound, but the most common focuses on a group of people known as the Minorcans who brought the seeds to Florida in 1763 from Menorca in the Balaeric Islands off the coast of Spain.
In 1763, Dr. Andrew Turnbull, a Scottish physician received a land grant to colonize what was then British East Florida. He recruited people from Italy, Corsica, Greece, and Menorca. These colonists, as indentured servants, arrived in New Smyrna, Florida, and were contracted for nine years to provide labor on Dr. Turnbull’s indigo plantation. In exchange, at the end of the nine years, they were to be granted their freedom and their own parcel of land.
Conditions were hard. In addition to being beaten and treated poorly by Dr. Turnbull and his overseers, food and resources were scarce and malaria and other illnesses killed off many of the settlers. Dr. Turnbull reneged on the contracts and many of the settlers revolted. They walked over 70 miles north to St. Augustine, and were freed by Governor Tonyn in 1777. The Minorcans, as the colonists called themselves collectively at that time, settled in St. Augustine and began to farm their own small plots of land, growing among other things, datil peppers from seeds they lovingly carried with them. Many proud descendants of those original Minorcan settlers live in St Augustine and the surrounding area to this day.
Datil peppers resemble the fatali pepper from Africa, so another legend is that they were brought into St Augustine by slave traders. The fatali pepper is believed to originate in the Central African Republic, and is widely used in African cooking.
The Complete Chili Pepper Book by Dave DeWitt and Paul W. Bosland, suggests that the datil pepper was introduced to St. Augustine in 1880 by S.B. Valls, a jelly maker from Cuba. This is a beautiful book, full of incredible color photographs, and information on what they describe as the “top 100” chili peppers which can be grown in a home garden.
Although there are other accounts of how the datil pepper made its way to North East Florida, no definitive origin has been discovered. Regardless of where it came from, Minorcans and the city of St. Augustine embrace the datil as their own treasured pepper. Its fiery flavor is so special that local families hand down their treasured recipes for datil pepper hot sauce from one generation to another.