Big feijoa — big taste?
Colossal fruit destined for a yummy fate
Kate Cooper and her family had the mother of all feijoa crumbles last week. The biggest feijoa she’s ever laid eyes on came into Kate’s possession recently and she was keen to show off the colossal fruit . . . before it became pudding.
The feijoa is 409 grams, 115mm in length, 55mm wide and 270mm in girth.
It’s up there with the biggest feijoas recorded in the country on the internet. A proud Auckland family grew a 423g feijoa, another family from Hamilton had a 420g one.
The fruit bearer was Katikati’s Richard and Colleen Jackson.
They only have one feijoa tree in their backyard, but it’s a doozy.
“There’s no maintenance other than pruning, we don’t do anything special to the tree or the soil. The feijoa was high up in the middle of the tree,” he said.
They planted the tree 12 years ago (variety unknown) and it is at least four metres high now. The tree always fruits more than they know what to do with and each year they give away loads to friends like Kate.
There were just two biggies on the tree and the rest small. The other mother feijoa was 300g.
“All I thought when I saw it was that’s an unusual one, it must have been there from the very beginning,” Richard said.
Kate put the feijoa on a local Facebook page asking if anyone could match it and had a good response, but hers came up trumps.
New Zealand Feijoa Growers Association manager Ian Turk says it’s this time of year people start having some fun comparing fruit sizes.
One of his team once grew a 900g feijoa.
“I like them when they’re a reasonable size but when they get too big . . . I don’t know about the taste.”