FEIJOA FRENZY

The feijoas are starting to fall and though I am sure I will be sick of them by the end of the season, at the moment we are still eating as many as the tree drops in a day.

‘Unique’ is in full flow now with ‘Apollo’ starting and just a few of the ‘Wiki Tu’ dropping to allow us a taste comparison. ‘Triumph’ is loaded but the fruit will come later.

Tasting the varieties all at once like this highlights their difference in both flavour and grittiness, and it is not just because it is the first each season that ‘Unique’ rates the best for me flavour-wise. Unfortunately it is not the best tree-wise. I have had trouble with brittle branches, and half the tree snapped off last year with the weight of the fruit. I am not sure if that is a nutritional or varietal problem but since I like the fruit so much I persist with judicious pruning and a funnyshaped tree. I have considered planting other varieties that apparently fruit even earlier, but I want to taste them first.

‘Apollo’ has a sweet, mild taste that others love, but which I find insipid. However, their huge size makes them great for processing. A good dose of compost around the tree earlier in the year is really paying off as the fruit are huge enough to eat with a dessertspoon and plentiful enough to feed friends and extended family.

I don’t subscribe to the theory that feijoas should be pruned to allow birds to fly through the canopy. Feijoas have a lot of other pollinators and do just fine left alone. They flower and fruit at the base of new growth, so if you wish to prune or hedge them, prune one side each year so the other side still produces. I just take enough branches off the bottom to allow easy collection of the fruit. blotch. To reduce this fungal growth, this winter, I will prune the tree to allow more airflow and will also give it a good dose of compost and spray it with fish fertiliser.

For years I’ve scorned the need to grow an apple just for cooking, saying that the multipurpose ‘Granny Smith’ and ‘Monty’s Surprise’ provide more cookers than I need. But a true cooking apple dissolves into a light, fluffy texture when stewed and has

an intense, acidic flavour, rendering the sweet eating apples insipid and tough in comparison.

Last year a friend sent me some ‘Granny Luisa’ cookers. The resulting fluffy, flavoursome pie had me requesting a tree immediately. Last week another friend gave me a ‘Bramley’s Seedling’ to try. Stewed on top of my Weet-Bix this morning,

I’m inclined to get a tree of that too. Another friend claims ‘Ballarat’ is the ultimate cooker, while yet another claims ‘Peasgood’s

Nonsuch’ is the one to explode into fluff and multipurpose ‘Gravenstein’ is the ultimate in applely flavour. How many cookers do I need?