Pitanga, Brazilian Cherry

Pitanga fruit (photo from Wikipedia)

Fluffy white flowers of Pitanga (Eugenia uniflora)

Photo courtesy of Claudia G.

This native tree of Brazil which grows to about 4 metres has developed a reputation for becoming a bit of a weed in warm climates across the world. The small fluted cherry like fruits which turn red when ripe are attractive to birds which spread the seeds far and wide including native bushland. To stop this happening it is advisable to net the tree at fruiting time.

 I am not a huge fan of the flavour of the fruit. I recall it has both a hot and sour taste. As an ornamental plant it has attractive red new leaves and was once recommended as a hedge plant  by David Herbert writing in Brisbane in the middle of last century. It is now less grown commercially as our native species in that family have become hugely popular.

Jaboticaba fruit

Myrciaria cauliflora, Jaboticaba

photo courtesy of Claudia G.

Thanks for sending the picture Claudia. I was interested to hear the comment from Sandy from the Sunshine Coast in Queensland that the fruit was available at her local farmers' market. I guess it is very soft fruit and may not transport well and therefore may not become better known outside local areas where it is grown. The wine made from the fruit sounds very interesting as well.

Banana harvest

Tree ripened, just picked, full of flavour, perfect...

I am thinking of Queenslander, "banana bender" and tennis champion Samantha Stosur  who is defending her US Open title in New York City at Flushing Meadow at the moment. Good luck Sam! Talking bananas today to a couple of work colleagues who are unable to get their trees to fruit because they get damaged by winter frost and cold. So I count myself lucky that I can grow a good crop because the flavour is just so different to the artificially ripened ones you buy at the greengrocer. Another work mate gave me a bunch of his 'Lady Finger' variety (pictured below) which he grows in his garden in the Sydney suburb of Marrickville. The recent gale force winds brought down his trees and did lots of damage to many gardens throughout the region. Who else hates the last two weeks of August and the unpredictable weather?

Part of New York City rock history is the famous recording by The Velvet Underground and Nico with cover art by Andy Warhol.

 

Cape Gooseberry, Physalis peruviana

 Cape Gooseberry Fruit

Before I get arrested by the weed police for growing a plant which is prohibited from sale or commercial propagation in New South Wales and Queensland, I should make it known that I bought my Cape Gooseberry bush from a grower in Victoria. I have it growing underneath a couple of lime trees and it has already made good use of their branches to scramble up into the canopy, spreading and climbing in all directions. Today I have been foraging underneath all this tangle for the fruit which lie on the ground quietly protected by a papery calyx without interference from bugs or slugs.They are delicious when eaten fresh as they have a good balance of tart and sweet flavour and the more golden coloured they are the better they taste. The papery husk becomes almost like lace after a time and that is a good indication of when the fruit is at its best. I guess they are no longer a commercial crop here because harvesting them is fairly labour intensive and not all the fruit on a bush ripens at once. However old timers such as myself who grew up in Brisbane will remember the wonderful cape gooseberry jam produced by Mason's Jam factory in the Brisbane suburb of The Gap up until the early 1970's. A fantastic artisan product in the days before farmers' markets and organic growers.

The fruit has more of a tradition of use in Europe. In France where it is known as coqueret du Perou, the fruit is glazed, cut in half and used on top of cream iced petit fours thus resembling a charming miniature fried egg. The tart fruit flavour perfectly balanced with sweet cream. No such imaginative use here, even though it is recorded as having been grown in Sydney as early as 1802, appearing under the name of Physalis pubescens ,a reference to the soft downy stems and leaves.

Because it is a weed I won't give any horticultural cultivation notes for growing it but happy foraging for those who live on the warm east coast. The NSW online Flora database gives all the districts where it can be found.  Remember to always to get positive identification of a wild plant from an expert before eating anything if you are not sure whether it is ok.

Tree Tomato, Tamarillo

 

 Tree tomato or Tamarillo

There is nothing quite like the first fruit of the season picked and eaten straight from the tree, and the tamarillo has a wonderful balance of sweet and tart flavour. It cleanses the palate and puts a real zing in your mouth. We have the Kiwis to thank for making the fruit popular here as they coined the word 'tamarillo' in 1967 and produced the first commercial crops in the southern hemisphere which they exported around the world. The tree is actually indigenous to South America, in particular the regions of southern Bolivia and northwestern Argentina. On YouTube there are many videos featuring the production of fruit in these regions as well as lots of interesting recipes using it for both sweet and savoury dishes.

Tamarillos are quick growing trees and I would recommend staking them or giving them special protection in windy sites. For me, this is a case of expert advise not headed. My tree blew over in gale during the "big wet" of late summer. It has continued to grow at a 45 degree angle so the crown of the tree is now flat at eye level, with the new shoots pointing upwards. It looks pretty strange and I have to duck under it as it is now blocking a path. When the flowers first appeared I gave the tree a big feed of compost and some complete fruit tree fertilizer. Consequently I have been rewarded by a bumper crop. The tree is grafted onto a wild tobacco plant Solanum sp which makes it more resistant to eelworms and soil fungal problems. I think the life span of a tree is about five years but I may be proved wrong with this one, even though it has used up one life already and survived to live on in a bit of a kooky way. The tree trunk is pictured below.

Arbutus unedo, Irish Strawberry Tree

Arbutus unedo, The Strawberry Tree
It is flowering now in Autumn sunshine

Arbutus is from southern Europe, Ireland and the Canary Islands but it is especially popular in the Algarave province of Portugal where they turn the fruit into a mean hard spirit with a kick called Medronho. In Spain, the city of Madrid was once surrounded by Arbutus trees and the city's coat of arms shows a bear and an Arbutus tree.

Here it grows across a range of climates but does better in cool districts. I am not aware of the fruit being popular here for use in the making of liqueurs but it is an exceptionally decorative large shrub to small tree with dense green foliage absolutely smothered in white waxy flowers at this time of year. I no longer attempt to grow it here on the coast as it was fairly susceptible to spider mite which turned the leaves a silvery colour.

Growing Citrus

A good year for Mandarins

Right now you can buy Navel oranges for about 50 cents a kilo such is the plentiful supply of citrus fruits this year. I have a similar "problem" with backyard grown Mandarins. They are perfect and sweet and the ground is littered with fallen fruit. No special fertilizer given to the tree, but it had a fantastic supply of good steady rain over the growing season Likewise the lemon tree which also has a terrific crop this winter. The lemon tree would completely fail all garden magazine "how to grow the perfect lemon" advice. I decided not to fertilize it at all because I am tired of getting a crop of those humongous lemons which weigh the branches to the ground. This season I have plenty of juicy small fruit .......perfect really. The leaves however would surely send a citrus expert into a state of shock as they all pale yellow. And then there is the bark which is covered in scale. Just don't tell anyone.............

Rosella, Hibiscus sadariffa

Rosella fruit of Hibiscus sabdariffa

I wrote about Rosellas two years ago on this blog and at the time said it was too far south to grow them properly . Well I have been proved wrong by the Burmese-Australians who have a huge crop on their community garden plot. They harvest the leaves regularly to make soup, though they have an interesting sharp sour taste when eaten raw. So next summer I will be growing some.

Olive harvest

From March to May olives slowly turn from green to black and this year Monica's tree has a bumper crop with branches bending low under the weight of fruit. The tree has been allowed to grow un-pruned for years as its main purpose in life is to provide summer shade from the fierce western sun and add atmosphere to a wonderful Italianate Sydney garden. The last time I pickled the olives from this tree the fruit had bruised as I had collected them as windfall and the resulting olives were too soft and only really good for making tapenade. This year the arborist was at work in the garden and he gently lowered the laden branches to the ground so I could hand pick them.
Patience is the key to successful pickling it seems. Last time I added too much salt when processing them which I didn't seem to wash off properly. Reading Maggie Beer's approach to preserving olives in her book Maggie's Farm has given me an incite into what can go wrong and it seems even the experts can have failures. So in about 6 weeks time and many changes of water later I might have some nice olives to share around.

Refractometer

How sweet is it? Using a refractometer to test the quality of fruit and vegetables.

Two of my mates said I needed one of these Brix refractometers if I was going to get serious about growing organic fruit and vegetables. One uses his for testing the sweetness of his grapes in the lead up to their harvest for wine production. The theory behind it is that within a given species of plant, the crop with the higher refractive index will have a higher sugar content, higher mineral content, higher protein content and a greater specific gravity or density.This adds up to a sweeter tasting, more minerally nutritious food with lower nitrate and water content, lower freezing temperature and better storage attributes. So these strawberries I picked today gave a reading of 16+ which is in the excellent range compared with some store bought ones which gave a 6 reading which is in the poor range. This explains why the store bought ones taste like cardboard!

Lemon Delicious

A bumper crop of lemons this Spring

A little bit of fertilizer applied throughout the growing season and drip irrigation seems to be the secret to growing a tree full of juicy lemons.
A foolproof easy to make dessert using lemons is lemon delicious pudding:
Ingredients
2 tablespoons butter
3/4 cup sugar
2 tablespoons self-raising flour
pinch of salt
grated rind of 2 lemons
2 eggs separated
1 cup of milk
MethodCream the butter and sugar. Add the flour and salt. Add grated lemon rind, egg yolk, and milk. Fold in stiffly beaten egg white. bake in a double dish (stand in water) for 40 minutes at 175C (340F)

banana plant maintenance

'Red Dacca' Banana Tree

It's the time of year to do some maintenance on Banana trees. I remove all the wind damaged branches and cut them up to use as mulch. It is essential to also remove most of the suckers or side shoots to allow all the energy to go into the main fruit producing stem. You leave three to grow for future fruit production.Once tidied up, I like to give them a dressing of blood and bone fertilizer and a bag of cow manure as well.

Persimmon

Write me down
As one who loved poetry
And Persimmons.
Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902)

Masaoka Shiki
Japanese Poet

Fig Variety 'Blue Province'

The Blue Province fig is a late season variety with excellent flavour. The skin has a steely blue bloom to it hence the name. Autumn ripening figs are incredibly sweet and this year as we had good summer at just the right time to ensure a great crop. I took this photo after I had a bite of one straight from the tree.
2017 update: I do not have any plants for sale.

First Figs

Small and sweet ,'White Adriatic' Figs

Never before have figs been ripe so early in Summer. Usually you have to wait until mid January before the first figs are ready for picking. It is not only here where fruit trees are growing out of character, perhaps because of climate change. I read a blog post recently from Portugal where the figs were producing fruit in the beginning of their winter.
What I like to do with figs is slice them in half and put brown sugar in the centre and then grill them until the sugar turns to caramel. I serve them with a big dollop of Greek style yogurt.

Apricot tree......Xing

Picked today some Apricots

Climate change and global warming may have a big impact on the growing of food plants, not only in broad scale agriculture and horticulture but in the home garden as well. After the warmest Winter on record and lots of hot days during early Spring it was to be expected that the crop from my apricot tree was to be small even without the possums beating me to half the crop. Apricots, like most stone fruit, require a period of winter chill to result in good fruit set and are perhaps better suited to a more temperate or Mediterranean climate than is provided locally. That said, even without a bountiful supply of fruit, they are quite an ornamental tree with their rounded glossy leaves and pleasing overall shape.The tree these fruit are from is barely 2 metres tall and would be expected to easily double that over time.
Apricot trees are thought to be originally from India but are also native to China where they are found growing wild in the mountains of the north and into southern Mongolia. Records indicate they have been cultivated for their fruit and kernels as early as 500 BC.They are called Xing or 'successful candidate flower', the appearance of their blossom coinciding with imperial examinations.

Cydonia oblonga, Quince

Caravaggio, M.(1573-1610)

Bacchus 1595/97, Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi

The golden apple of Greek Mythology, the Quince, as depicted by Caravaggio. Along with the other fruit in this painting, it is the subject of much study and interest. One can read more on this topic 'Caravaggio's Fruit: A mirror of Baroque Horticulture' at the website of Purdue University in the US State of Indiana www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/caravaggio/caravaggio.html.

It is not cold enough here to grow Quinces, however the fruit is coming into season now and
good ones are starting to appear in the markets . The Quince or 'pear of Cydonia' is native to the Middle East (Caucasus,Turkey,and Iran) but is widely cultivated in cool temperate regions of the world .It requires a certain number of very cold days (ie.frosty) to stimulate flowering and good fruit production. In cooking, I like to use them in both sweet and savoury dishes. I bake them in a wine and sugar syrup with a bit of cinnamon added, until they turn a rich red colour surrounded by a toffee like sauce. They are also good added to a Moroccan style tagine or stew of lamb or in the Greek pork and tomato stew khirino me kithonia. It is interesting that the English word for marmalade jam, usually made from citrus fruits, is derived from the Portuguese marmelada which is made from Quinces. Worth trying as well is the famous quince paste made by Maggie Beer. In France this goes by the name of cotignac and in Spain dulce de membrillo.

Ficus carica The Fig

From a horticultural point of view ,the fig tree is one of the easiest fruit trees to grow and in fact will react to over-fertile soils by producing very little fruit. If planting one, the trick is to fill the planting hole with some old concrete rubble and don't bother to remove the black plastic planter bag it was grown in,as they like to have their roots constricted . Thus imitating their natural habit of growing out of old walls in Mediterranean countries.That said ,a mulch of some cow manure in spring would suffice as fertilizer to keep them producing well. There are several varieties available with both purple or green skin and trees will start to fruit within three years of planting. All fig trees need to be netted once the fruit has formed to protect them from birds.
It has been a good hot summer for the ripening of figs and they are just starting to make an appearance at the local growers' market. You need to eat them just after they have been picked as ripe figs oozing sugar only last for a few days before starting to ferment or forming a layer of grey mould over their soft skin. Apart from eating them fresh, I like to have them wrapped in thin slices of prosciutto di Parma washed down by a glass of icy cold VB or crisp white wine. As a dessert ,I oven bake them for 15 minutes with brown sugar and a little butter. The resulting figs are swimming in caramel sauce which can be poured over ice-cream. A little lime zest on top makes them taste even better. I recently had figs in a salad made for a lunch by some Greek friends. The figs were accompanied by walnuts, goat's cheese and watercress . The combination was fantastic.
If you do have any left over figs or have a huge crop, they can be dried or preserved by placing them in jars and covering with alcohol such as a good port. The resulting drunken figs would be ready for eating by winter to remind you of the joys of summer.
2017 update Its the 5th of February and the figs have already been picked so are they ripening sooner now?

Shatoot Mulberry, Morus macroura

Today the first green buds and flowers appeared on the Shatoot Mulberry
I was admiring the bare elegant tracery of the branches against a clear blue sky when I spotted the first tinge of green. This is both a blessing and a curse. It means the days are getting warmer and longer, but there are still all those garden tasks to get done before the weather really warms up.
This Mulberry is a much loved tree of Pakistan where the sickly sweet fruit is dried as a sugar substitute. It is called a yard tree and often forms the centrepiece of a small courtyard garden. The tall arching branches provide generous shade in Summer. However, It really does need a lot of space to look at its best but will take heavy pruning ,poor soils and difficult sites. In other words ,it is a great tree for spots where winter sun is required and heavy summer shade is needed where you can set up a table and chairs.
The pale yellow fruit is produced in such quantities that I usually rake it up to give to the chooks.
It is probably the only fruit tree you won't mind sharing with birds.
A pair of Red-whiskered Bulbuls, much loved by novelist Patrick White where they were a familiar site around his Centennial Park home, usually take up residence .Described accurately by Graham Pizzey as having"jaunty pleasant liquid notes"
My favourite bird visitor to this tree is the Koel which is sometimes called the Cooee or Rainbird..
The male bird is glossy blue black and very amusing to watch because it is so clumsy . It is currently on holiday in New Guinea.
I would recommend this tree because it forms such a good shape. It does get quite tall but is unlikely to fall down in a storm as the branches are quite elastic and supple.