Fruit & Fruit Trees

Have you ever had an especially rewarding, adventurous, dangerous, or really stupid experience of harvesting/foraging fruit?

I tend to live a sheltered life, so I don't have anything too exciting to share. I've harvested bananas with a hornets' nest on the underside of a leaf multiple times, but nothing unusual ever happened. I've gone wading through the swamp looking for aguaje, but the anacondas had already been hunted to extinction in that area. I've stood under a fruiting durian tree without a helmet, but it seems that durians don't just fall from the sky when I'm hungry.

Does anyone have an exciting or uplifting story to share?

WASHINGTON COURT HOUSE, Ohio (AP) — Stubborn drought in Ohio and the shifting weather patterns influenced by climate change appear to be affecting North America’s largest native fruit: the pawpaw.

Avocado-sized with a taste sometimes described as a cross between a mango and banana, the pawpaw is beloved by many but rarely seen in grocery stores in the U.S. due to its short shelf life. The fruit grows in various places in the eastern half of North America, from Ontario to Florida. But in parts of Ohio, which hosts an annual festival dedicated to the fruit, and Kentucky, some growers this year are reporting earlier-than-normal harvests and bitter-tasting fruit, a possible effect of the extreme weather from the spring freezes to drought that has hit the region.

Take Valerie Libbey’s orchard in Washington Court House, about an hour’s drive from Columbus. Libbey grows 100 pawpaw trees and said she was surprised to see the fruit dropping from trees in the first week of August instead of mid-September.

“I had walked into the orchard to do my regular irrigation and the smell of the fruit just hit me,” said Libbey, who added that this year’s harvest period was much shorter than in previous years and the fruits themselves were smaller and more bitter.

archived (Wayback Machine)

No longer breaking news, but it will probably be just as relevant in the years to come.

CONTENT WARNING: gore, animal abuse, cookery

main plants featured:

• Myristica fragrans
• Piper nigrum
• Metroxylon sagu
• Canarium indicum
• Myristica argentea

Know the climate requirements of your fruits! Know the impact of future climate change on your region! The trees that you plant today will need to endure the climate conditions decades from now.

Abstract

Climate change is an emerging threat to global food and nutritional security. The tropical fruits such as mango, bananas, passionfruit, custard apples, and papaya are highly sensitive to weather changes especially; changes of monsoon onset and elevated temperature are influencing crop growth and production. There is a need for more specific studies concerning individual crops and regional variations. Long-term effects and interactions of weather parameters and increased concentration of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide, with phenological stages of the plant, pests, and diseases remain understudied, while adaptation strategies require further exploration for comprehensive understanding and effective mitigation. Few researchers have addressed the issues on the effect of climate change on tropical fruits. This paper focuses on the impact of abiotic (temperature, rainfall, humidity, wind speed, evaporation, carbon dioxide concentration) and biotic (pest and pathogens dynamics) factors affecting the fruit crop ecosystem. These factors influence flowering, pollination, fruit set, fruit yield and quality. This review paper will help develop adaptive strategies, policy interventions and technological innovations aimed at mitigating the adverse effects of climate change on tropical fruit production and safeguarding global food and nutritional security.

Click "Download the selected file" to open the full text as PDF.

archived (Wayback Machine)

• Useful Temperate Plants
• Wikipedia

Not necessarily your favourite fruit to eat, but what is/are your favourite fruit tree(s) to grow based on survival rate, fruit yield, ease of maintenance, ease of harvest, grass-killing prowess, and any other combination of factors? What is/are your least favourite? If you have photos or diagrams to illustrate your point, even better!

(If you provide your region and/or Köppen-Geiger or Trewartha climate zone, it will help others to know what to plant or what to avoid!)

Conservation orchards, or living collections, for fruit trees serve as a means to preserve genetic diversity while making it available in case of emergencies to preempt threats associated with global changes. Unlike seed banks, these collections provide immediate access to the necessary materials (pollen and flowers) for crossbreeding in varietal improvement programmes, as well as for reforestation and the conservation of wild relatives in forests. These conservation orchards also serve as open-air laboratories to study the response of fruit trees to climate conditions and parasite attacks, as well as the evolutionary and ecological processes that give rise to biodiversity.

archived (Wayback Machine)

posted at the request of Lumicon

fruit featured:

• Nephelium ramboutan-ake

(It's like a juicy and sweet rainforest rambutan, and the tree doesn't have such strong apical dominance.)

See also: bigger pulasan separating easily from the seed

What did you harvest recently? Post photos if you like, and brag about what you grew or foraged.

fruit featured: Garcinia mangostana

Long live the queen!

Mangosteen (Garcinia mangostana var. mangostana) is a popular tropical fruit, yet many aspects of its biology and evolutionary history are little known. Its origin remains contentious, although recent findings suggest G. mangostana L. var. malaccensis (Hook. f.) Nazre (synonym: G. malaccensis Hook. f.) as the sole progenitor. We review hypotheses on the origin of mangosteen and clarify points that have been affected by errors of fact and interpretation. The narrow focus and lack of detail in published results make their interpretation difficult. When possible, we support our interpretations with field observations and examination of herbarium specimens. We outline the main biological traits (e.g., dioecy, facultative apomixis, and polyploidy) of mangosteen and its wild relatives to infer traits that might have evolved during domestication of mangosteen. We find no clear indication that apomixis and polyploidy evolved during domestication. Polyploidy is known in the wild relatives, but apomixis has not yet been demonstrated. Also, we propose a testable new evolutionary‐ecological framework that we call “Forest‐Dusun Interface” to infer processes in the origin of mangosteen. Dusun (Malay) refers to subsistence orchards in this context. Lastly, we propose future studies to address identified knowledge gaps.

archived (Wayback Machine)

Thumbnail image by Ivar Leidus (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Archived (Wayback Machine):

• earth.com article
• study cited as webpage and PDF

The large leaves of the aguaje, a tropical palm tree that grows in the peatlands and other seasonal wetland areas in tropical South America, form a rounded crown on its head from which its oval-shaped fruits hang heavily in bunches from December to June. When the reddish maroon reptilian-looking fruits are ready for harvest, trained tree climbers from the Indigenous Maijuna communities in the Peruvian Amazon climb the 35-meter (115-foot) gangling trees to collect them.

Previously, the Maijuna people harvested the fruit by cutting down the trees. So did many others, such as Kichwa and Kukama Kukamiria communities. While easier, this led to the degradation of the landscape and genetic diversity as aguaje trees (Mauritia flexuosa) are dioecious, meaning only female trees produce fruit. In the 1990s, the discovery of its market potential led to large-scale commercial extraction by both Indigenous communities and outsiders across the Peruvian Amazon.

“Our ancestors weren’t aware that they were harming their palm trees,” Edber Tang Rios, president of the Maijuna-Kichwa Regional Conservation Area (ACR) management committee, told Mongabay over WhatsApp voice messages. “They had no knowledge. They cut it down and, little by little, it was dying out.”

archived (Wayback Machine)

Most likely a Pouteria species, and (judging by the name) probably native to the (Ecuadorian?) Amazon, and probably bears edible fruit, but I don’t know any of that for sure. Anyone have an idea as to what it could be?

posted at the request of Lumicon

fruit featured:

• Artocarpus integer × heterophyllus

@LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net knows what's up.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/12862782

Thank you @fossilesque@mander.xyz for posting this photo!

El híbrido FHIA-18 del grupo AAAB, es un banano con sabor a manzano, agridulce, similar al Prata Anâ del Brasil. Es rústico y resistente a enfermedades. Se consume fresco y procesado. Se encuentra en producción comercial en Cuba y en Perú.

¿El mejor banano del mundo?

Most likely a Pouteria species, and (judging by the name) probably native to the Chocó biome of NW Ecuador and/or the Pacific coast of Colombia, and probably bears edible fruit, but I don’t know any of that for sure. Anyone have an idea as to what it could be?

posted at the request of Lumicon

fruits featured:

• Garcinia prainiana
• Theobroma cacao
• Salacca zalacca

Follow-up video

fruits featured:

• Garcinia prainiana
• Persea americana

visible in background:

• Artocarpus integer × heterophyllus
• Artocarpus altilis
• Gustavia macarenensis

A seemingly-undocumented Artocarpus with unique leaves and somewhat sour fruits. Superior to Artocarpus elasticus. Fruits ripen at the same time as Artocarpus lanceifolius, which overlaps the end of the season for Artocarpus odoratissimus.

Photographed at Jim West's place in Guaycuyacu (Ecuador).

archived (Wayback Machine)

...one thousand trucks poured into the national park, offloading over 12,000 metric tons of sticky, mealy, orange compost onto the worn-out plot. The site was left untouched and largely unexamined for over a decade. A sign was placed to ensure future researchers could locate and study it.

16 years later, Janzen dispatched graduate student Timothy Treuer to look for the site where the food waste was dumped.

Treuer initially set out to locate the large placard that marked the plot — and failed.

Compost your fruit scraps! (Or just throw them on the neighbour's pasture land.)

The fruit is edible, but there's not much food on it, so probably not worth planting outside of its native range.

photos by Lumicon

This plant should not be thriving in this environment. It is growing on compacted oxisol in an area that gets over 4 metres of rain. Yet here it is, growing completely out of control. Nothing makes sense. Climate change?

Source

It's aimed mostly at commercial growers, but it gives a useful overview for anyone new to growing fruit. Topics covered include growth rhythms, propagation, pruning, pollination, and harvesting.

Best read in conjunction with:

• Propagating and planting trees
• Agroforestry
• Abundance Agroforestry
• An Illustrated Guide to Agroforestry
• Natural succession of species in agroforestry and in soil recovery

Judging by the name, probably native to the coast of Ecuador, and probably bears edible fruit, but I don't know that for sure. Anyone have an idea as to what it could be?