Category Archives: Fruit

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July 17, 2014

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Fruit, Garden trees, Gardening, Plants and what I know about them, Possums

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A custard apple as big as a horse’s head

…can be harvested, by you, from your back garden in two years, with *no skill whatsoever required*.  Yes, you’ve stumbled onto the TV Shopping Network, and with that custard apple big enough to fell an ox you also get a complete set of steak knives!!

Custard apple cut open

Okay, a very tiny horse

Seriously, why doesn’t everyone (or at least, everyone in temperate to sub-tropical Australia) grow custard apples?  Louis Glowinski, the man on underappreciated backyard fruits, suggests that anywhere you can grow a lemon tree, you can grow a custard apple (sorry, mountain dwellers and Canberrans, they don’t like a hard frost).  Pretty much every garden larger than a pocket handkerchief in coastal Australia has a lemon tree, but custard apples are seen as tropical exotica.

Take it from me, the most incompetent of plant killers can grow a fruitful custard apple tree. And what fruits!  Second only to the mango in my own personal fruity hall of fame. The tree itself is quite beautiful, modest in size (5-8 metres) with generous spring-green leaves, that, in Sydney at least, it loses for a few bare-branched weeks in late winter, before the next year’s bud burst.  My little tree sprang up from the ground like Jack’s beanstalk, gaining about three metres in height in its first three years. Aesthetics aside, the thick skin on the fruit seems to repel fruit fly and, so far, the possums have investigated but haven’t persevered with their nibbling long enough to realise the glories that lie beneath the crocodilian skin.  Long may their ignorance continue!

Spirited little custard apple tree blocking my garden path
Custard pple leaves

Louis, bless his cotton socks, while giving big raps to the cherimoya and its cousins, the atemoya (apparently the “custard apple” mostly likely to be found at the shops) and the sweetsop or sugar apple, makes fruit production sound a little tricky. According to him “cherimoyas need a relative humidity of 70-80% during flowering to set fruit and to ensure that the fruit produced is of a uniform shape and an adequate size” (221).

I think Dr Glowinski’s bar for successful fruit growing is significantly higher than mine.  Bring on those illmatched and asymmetrical fruits, I say! Nonetheless, obedient as always to learned authority, as soon as the first little greenish-brown flowers appeared along the branches of my sapling, I was out there, kids’ paintbrush in one hand, recycled take-away container in the other, all ready for some assisted reproduction.

Dr Glowinski recommends collecting pollen in mid-afternoon from wide-open flowers, now releasing their pollen after of a day of sticky receptivity, and then applying it by “twirling the brush several times around the conical ovary” (222) of the newly opened “female” blooms of late afternoon.  He describes a couple of other even more complex methods, involving toothpicks, blotting paper and refrigerated paperbags but my brain slid off these entirely.  Glowinski recommends you continue doing this every few days until you are satisfied with the number of fruit set.  Or in my case, until the paintbrush gets used for children’s craft activities.  Who knows what glitter paint could do to the symmetry of my cherimoya harvest?

I’m pretty sure my ovary twirling lacked a certain something, as only two fruits eventuated from that first foray into annona IVF.  Then, last spring we were overseas for several months during the custard apple breeding season.  I didn’t hold out much hope for this year’s harvest – it seemed a bit much to ask our Swedish tenants to get so deeply involved in the sexual lives of our fruit trees.  Surprisingly, however, without any kind of moral or technical support from me, we had a crop of four fruits this year.  I will admit, our crop lacked something in consistent sizing.  But it tasted fabulous.

I’ll be back to the interventionist approach to the custard apples this year.  With luck next winter the tree will be groaning with perfectly symmetrical fruit.  In fact, there may be a cascade of intervention, since my custard apple, never having felt the touch of a blade, thanks to my morbid fear of pruning, doesn’t look like it could endure that kind of heavy burden.

In a previous life as a cramped British gardener I accidentally executed a morello cherry with my secateurs and I live in fear of more casualties.  But, despite a fairly sheltered position, my cherimoya, made vulnerable by its broad leaves and long whippy branches, has already been topped by a brutal southerly.  I’m going to have to get out there, Glowinski’s Complete Book of Fruit Growing in Australia in one clammy hand, and work on those “second generation laterals” and “wider angled crotches” (220).  I’m encouraged by the thought that no matter how crudely I amputate the poor thing, chances are it will produce a few misshapen but delicious fruits anyway.

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July 11, 2014

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Fruit, Fruits for shade, Ornamental gardens, Plants and what I know about them, poisons, Possums

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Delicious monsters

After giving a damning review to one weird home-grown fruit I thought I’d better balance out the report card on the food forest.  The babaco I selected and carefully cultivated myself.  But the Monstera deliciosa (or cheese plant as its sometimes called, because of the swiss cheese-like holes in its leaves) was flourishing here long before we arrived.  It did seem to get a new lease on life when the large gum tree that had shaded it fell on our house – the rejuvenating power of schadenfreude perhaps – and I’ve had to hack it back numerous times since.

“The window plant”
The next crop

While most people grow this plant as an ornamental, I had heard its fruits were edible.  Our rampant vine has had quite a number of fruits over the years, but it wasn’t until I stepped over one knocked down and half eaten by possums that, in a moment of uncharacteristic boldness, I decided I would have to give them a try.  I hacked off the end that had been nibbled by critters, for cootie management, and, peeling off the small green cap on each, tasted a few of the hexagonal berries, compressed together pineapple-style. What a revelation – absolutely delicious, with a hint of a pineapple-like tartness, and the creamy mouth feel of a banana, but perhaps closest in texture and taste to a custard apple (also appearing from the bottom of the garden at the moment – yum!).

At a first taste the berries were sweet but quite firm.  After sampling a handful my throat felt slightly raspy, as it sometimes does after eating under-ripe pineapple, and there was a faint burning sensation around my chin and lips.  Rather hastily, I did some light googling to find that, thanks to needle-like raphides of our old friend oxalates, the fruit salad plant, including its unripe fruits, can be quite toxic. Oops.  There’s a lesson for the kids at home.

Unripe
Poisonous but beautiful

So, annoyingly, while babaco with its flavour of newly-laid-carpet is quite innocuous, monstera deliciosa fruits get the following rundown from the Queensland Government poisons centre: they are “considered edible” but can cause “immediate burning pain, and swelling of the lips, mouth, tongue and throat… copious salivation and difficulty breathing, swallowing or speaking… rapidly developing urticaria or hives, a transient swollen, itchy rash… nausea, abdominal pain and intense gastric irritation”.  Kill joys.

Given that my light snack on allegedly toxic unripe berries had only mild side effects, I decided to try to ripen the rest of the “cob” in a paper bag with a banana, as one site suggested.  As promised, after a few days the little green caps on each berry fall off spontaneously, although the fruit didn’t turn yellow as it appears in some of the pictures online.  The fruit seems to ripen from one end to the other, so I pulled off some of the rather scabrous looking lidless berries, leaving others, still clinging to their hats, to ripen further.  As you can see, the half gnawed fruit looks distinctly unglamorous, but the squoodgy berries underneath tasted great.

I’m going to keep eating them, carefully and in small quantities.  On a cautionary note, my tasters, the possums, haven’t been seen since the appearance of that discarded cob.  So if this is my last post, it was the raphides that dunnit.

Possum rejects
Not garden porn
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June 28, 2014

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Fruit, Fruits for shade, Garden trees, Gardening, Plants and what I know about them, Possums

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First fruit

Babaco

Not a great advertisement for a fecund food forest
Nearly ripe babaco with a banana for scale
Baby babaco fruit
Tasting the first fruit

I’ve had a few babacos now: small, cool climate papayas that are said to fruit prodigiously, and in the shade too.  My first expired very quickly, probably from root rot, to which they are apparently quite prone.  I kept the second in a pot for a while, for drainage reasons, and it clung on despite my peripatetic watering habits.  The third plant I put in the “food forest” part of the garden, and it seemed to grow pretty well, on a sandy slope with filtered summer sun and not a lot of light at all in winter, so I popped the one from the pot into the ground nearby, in a slightly brighter spot.  The second plant has had two torpedo-shaped green fruits hanging on for quite a while, during which time it has slowly but steadily shed all its leaves, possibly encouraged by the possums.  I began to think it might croak before the fruits ever ripened, given the seasonal gloom.  Eventually one of its paps started to turn a patchy lemon yellow. After some bad guessing with custard apples last year, I wouldn’t have been game to pick it but the fruit dropped off the tree of its own accord and pleasingly, ripened up quite well inside, sitting next to a banana in the fruit bowl.

Apparently the ancient Greeks had a tradition of offering the first fruit of the new season to Demeter, goddess of the harvest.  I suspect Demeter might have turned her nose up at my first babaco.  It’s been called the “champagne fruit“, and others suggest it tastes of strawberries and pineapple… it certainly has a citrus tang along with that strange slightly off taste of papaya and something else… the odour of freshly laid carpet? the plasticky inside of a new car…? Not something I would be super eager to eat anyway.  That said, it’s a good looking plant which seems to grow reasonably well in a tricky spot and apparently propagates easily too.  I’m fairly sure the taste of slightly curdled carpet offcuts will be the least of my problems after the zombie apocalypse so I think after Number Two’s second torpedo has been launched I might have a go at growing some cuttings.  I have to drum up plants for the school fete this year (yes, we will be running a cake stall while the government spends $12 billion on jets) and it is always possible that there are fruit-growers out there in Berowra that like the taste of new cars.

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March 27, 2014

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Animal pests, Animal senses, Australian natives, Fruit, fruit for shade, Fruits for shade, Gardening, Native animals, natural history, Plants and what I know about them, Possums

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Do possums see in technicolour?

Tamarillos: what a great fruit for inept, part-time gardeners!  Stupendously quick to grow – to a couple of metres in not much over twelve months.  Producing a crop in less than two years and in a shady spot too, tucked in amongst monstera deliciosa, naranjillas and a dwarf Cavendish banana in the lee of the neighbour’s tall pine tree, with filtered light in summer and just a touch of winter sun.  The egg sized fruits are quite pleasant to eat: flesh with the texture of a honeydew melon and with an overtone of passionfruit.  I like the big bright green tropical leaves and the fact that fruit flies seem to leave them alone.  But best of all, Matimba (as our youngest named the baby tree when it went in) didn’t seem to be pestered by possums.  Since the fruits dangle  from slender pendulous branches I wondered at first if the critters couldn’t make it to where the action was.  Then I thought perhaps they hadn’t spotted them yet, remembering how my figs and beans went untouched for a year or two.

And then recently I spotted a green but nibbled fruit under the tree.  Obviously the contents weren’t to the liking of the thief – not quite ripe enough, perhaps.  It might well have been an optimistic bird that did the dirty work.  But given that tamarillo fruits quite distinctly change in colour as they ripen – gold in the case of Matimba and red in the case of her as yet non-fruiting little sister Molly – this evidence of mid-snack mind-change made me wonder: “Do possums have colour vision?

Image

I realised only recently that primate colour vision is actually pretty unusual amongst mammals, whose ancestors swapped technicolour for better night vision while hiding amongst the shadows, waiting for dinosaurs to leave the party.  Humans, primates and monkeys have a kind of gerry-rigged third cone that gives us an in on the neat seed dispersal system fruit-bearing plants sorted out with birds and their dinosaurian tetrachromatic eyes.  Like parrots, we can spot a ripe fruit against a canopy of green leaves (although we don’t get to see the UV spectrum, which is disappointing).  Okay, there are other explanations for primate colour vision – like spotting tasty red-hued fresh leaves – but I’m sticking with this one for now.  Interestingly, colour-blind humans, primates and monkeys (particularly males) are still unusually common.  It seems that colour-blind individuals are great at seeing through camouflage, so a sprinkling of dichromatic members of the group serving as predator-spotters does a mob of monkeys or apes no harm at all.

Pulling out of the fascinating vortex of animal colour vision research and returning to my original question, what about possums?  With the ubiquity of brushtailed possums in suburban houses and gardens in Australia, surely someone would have a definitive answer on this one.

It turns out that marsupial colour vision has been a hotbed of academic research over the last fifteen years.  Until the early noughties it was assumed that marsupials, like most placental mammals, were dichromats, with pretty limited colour vision.  But then researchers identified that some marsupials, like the fat-tailed dunnart, the honey posssum and the quokka, were trichromats (as indeed were the ancestors of platypus and echidnas, the monotremes).  Some marsupials, like the poor old tammar wallaby, do seem to have the same rather average colour vision as the placentals.

Brush-tailed possum vision is so cutting edge that Lisa Vlahos’ PhD on it, completed in 2013, hasn’t even been published in science journals yet.  But, based on the annual reports at the Vision Centre at ANU (sadly I haven’t been able to access her endearingly named PhD thesis “Possum Magic”) it look like brushtails can see part of the UV spectrum, but can’t distinguish between white and green light: more like dogs than chickens, they’re red-green colour blind.

Which might explain my chewed and rejected green tamarillo fruit. Or not.  But it was fun finding out anyway!

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February 12, 2014

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Australian natives, Fruit, Gardening, Natives for shade, Vines, Weeds

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Backyard archaeology

Garden makeovers: love them.  Love hastily manufacturing a bespoke bamboo and zip-tie trellis in a frenzy of blunt rip saws and blisters.  Love labouring over a shovel to extract every last tuber of noxious, flourishing ginger lily.  Love spending all my discretionary money for the fortnight, and then some, on more plants that will feasibly fit in the boot of the car and planting them all in a rush, surveying them afterwards, faintly guilty but sated, with a hosepipe in my hand.

But sometimes there’s a hint that all these things – all the plans hatched on the backs of envelopes while nodding away to some background conversation, all the cruising of plant catalogues, all the impulse buys on a Sunday – have happened before.

A while back, with great effort, we moved some of the large barrels along the side of the granny flat a couple of metres down the hill into the sun, so we could plant them up with some figs – White Genoa and White Adriatic, since you are asking.  Where they had been, under a layer of soil and detritus, was a large tarpaulin, threaded through with roots and looking the worse for wear.  Shrugging, I pulled it up, tidied a bit and installed a trellis (an early “blue period” effort) along with a grafted Nellie Kelly black passionfruit vine.  The aim was to protect the granny flat, a fibro hotbox, from the westerly summer sun, and if the possums were slow on the uptake, get some fruit.

trellis 1Nellie swarmed up the trellis and onto the roof in no time, though I did start to notice some vigorous vines with  dull green leaves, three-lobed like the passionfruit, appearing amongst the mass of creepers over the garden wall nearby.  Did they look a little familiar?  Had I seen them before?  I pulled up a few and didn’t think too much about it.

Three years on, Nellie has done nothing fruit-wise and hasn’t even flowered much, which might say something about the cruelty to plants inflicted by a largely organic but also veggo gardener who has qualms about blood and bone.  That said, the dark-green vine hasn’t minded one bit, and has appeared everywhere in the garden, threading its way through the wallaby grass, swarming up the fig trees, and, during our tip away, anchoring the bamboo garden gate to the ground.  My “wait and see” weeding philosophy has spawned a tribe of voracious suckers from the root-stock passiflora caerula.  A beginners’ error, I have realised, after some research, especially on Hawkesbury sandstone.

Nellie’s got to go.  The plant and its Mr Hyde companion vine, almost as large, are summarily executed.  In a surprisingly short time, the contents of half a black passionfruit emptied into in a pot of seed-raising mix on the windowsill has germinated, despite predictions that it might take months.  Once the corpse of Nellie has been disposed of, one or two of these babies will replace her, and will hopefully survive the root rots to which the non-graft fruit are apparently prone.

I’ve clocked, of course, what that tarpaulin was all about.  Someone who lived here before, that person who we’ve often cursed for planting huge stands of reportable weeds and using only two screws in all the door hinges, made the same mistake.  Someone before me, on a whim, probably at Bunnings, bought one of Nellie’s clone sisters years ago, planted it in the very same spot, and then had to take drastic measures to keep the suckering hordes at bay.

One day (when my body is taken out of this place in a box)  maybe someone else will rip out my fruit trees, put a lawn across my asparagus and spray Round Up on the scurvy grass, kidney weed and native geranium that have crept back where the spider plants and trad used to run riot.  Maybe there’ll be a townhouse and a double-car garage where my mulberry tree is.  Perhaps the best I can hope is that someone will pull out my non-grafted passionfruit, muttering about root rot, and put in another Nellie Kelly.