The blooms started in early spring. The internet says they bloom in the fall. (Lies, LIES!) Plant is not self-fertile so you need two. Currently hand-pollinating bc only two plants have opened flowers and the rest are still buds. No pests noticed. Needs protection from high winds.
Guardian photographer Jill Mead pays a midnight visit to New Covent Garden market, the largest wholesale fruit, vegetable and flower market in the United Kingdom.
Aralia spinosa, devil’s walking stick: leaf buds and mature leaves are edible. Buds taste like broccoli/brussel sprouts (w/o bitterness), leaves taste like salad green + asafoetida. Dried berries give me slight allergic reaction but ppl use it as a pepper substitute.
Good to have the fruit bowl full again. I eat 3 pieces of fruit a day, and this coming week it will be a tangerine, an apple, and a pear. Persimmons are over, it looks like, so it's pears until plums and peaches come around.
It seems as if one of the fruits must than an initial "p." 🙂
Cold hardy to 28F/-2C, can be grown in a pot. Fruits 4-5 yrs from seed.
It’s the fruit that makes it so special. The peel is very sweet and chewy and the fruit inside balances it with a nice tartness. And bc you eat fruit+peel, it’s very nutritious.
I sell seedlings for $15 plus shipping available in early spring. Open to reservations now.
The peel comes away from the fruit easily and the fruit is sectional/easy to pull apart like a mandarin. The taste of the fruit is like a tart orange but the pith has sugar in it so it’s not completely sour. The peel is very sweet. Sometimes the fruit is seedless, but no more than 2 seeds per fruit.
Just came across something ppl should know about: grafted jaboticabas.
Red hybrids grow fast from seed and flower within 3-5 years. Most species flower after 6+ years. When you graft a flowering branch on a jabo, it can take 3 yrs for the graft to finally flower. So it makes sense to graft other species of jabo but not red hybrids which is what this Etsy seller was marketing for $220! 😱🤯
So despite being from Southeast Asia, my wife and I have never really loved dragonfruit (I only had one great dragonfruit once, on a farm in Indonesia): it’s usually kind of blah
But Ecuadorian yellow dragonfruit? Omg. It tastes like kiwi and guava at the same time!
We buy them online here (link contains referral code that helps this immigrant family with our grocery spend)
Traded homemade muffins for a bunch of these fruit. It’s a hybrid between trifoliate orange and Duncan grapefruit and can be used as a lemon substitute - it supposedly can grow in zone 7 so might be more convenient for northern growers rather than bring a 🍋 tree indoors.
Watered and sweetened to lemonade, you can definitely taste hints of grapefruit.
I just got this plant in a trade and I’m going to do a before and after 6 months pic to guilt the person I traded with as being a bad plant parent. This is the before pic. Will take a new pic beginning of June.
I knew that they probably get too large to keep in a pot but I found a mamey fruit 3 yrs ago that was the size of a large sopadilla and had a “small” seed inside. I grew it out thinking it would be a dwarf tree. Nope.