New Zealand’s most popular fruits
Lynda Hallinan’s tips on the best ways to grow and use them.
For three-quarters of the year, I ignore all the fruit trees in my garden. I rarely step foot into the orchard, unless it’s to admire the spring blossoms or give our kunekune pig a scratch on the back, but during the late summer and autumn harvest season, those trees are all I can think about. I chastise the poor performers and threaten to get out the chainsaw; sometimes – like when I’m lugging the umpteenth bucket of plums or basket of quinces indoors – I feel the same about the overachievers.
How I wish I’d shown a little more restraint a decade ago when I planted five quince trees, 20 pears, 40-odd plums and lord only knows how many apple trees. One of each would have been enough – but which one?
That’s the question I recently posed to the thousands of gardeners who follow me on Facebook. Ignoring the obvious fact – that none of us are actually capable of narrowing the field to a single fruit tree, unless we bend the rules by planting a multi-grafted specimen – there was consensus when it came to the most popular varieties. Lemons topped the list, with the multipurpose ‘Meyer’ favoured for its versatility and reliability, followed by heartshaped, tropical-tasting ‘Luisa’ plums, which we all seem to adore with a fervour that borders on obsession.
When we’re selecting trees to plant, we seem to love old and the new – the heirlooms and the hybrids – for quite different reasons. For the sake of nostalgia, for instance, we’re prepared to tolerate the sad state of many a ‘Golden Queen’ peach tree, yet we grizzle about leaf curl on nectarines.
Aucklanders enter a sort of culinary nirvana over a handful of homegrown apricots, while southerners enjoy huge crops of apricots that, as Caren Wilton puts it, “taste a million times nicer than those in the supermarket”.
If you are planning to plant a new fruit tree – or several – this coming winter, make your selections now and get your name on the waiting list at your local garden centre, as the most popular varieties soon sell out.
Homegrown APRICOTS send gardeners and A&P Show-preserving champions into raptures.
According to British food writer Nigel Slater, “a ripe apricot, all sunburned cheeks, sweet nectar and rust-brown freckles, is a rare find. Which, of course, makes them all the more precious.” My trees bear precious few fruit but in the right climate – here’s looking at you, Central Otago – apricots are an explosion of honey-sweet ambrosia, a gift from the gods, the king of stonefruit.
‘Moorpark’ has been the reigning English monarch since its introduction in 1760. For bottling, jamming, eating fresh and drying, it’s the variety that gardeners ask for by name, says fruit tree specialist Sarah Frater, owner of Manawatu mail-order nursery The Edible Garden (ediblegarden.co.nz). “I’ve never tasted another apricot that has come close to its deliciousness,” says Lisa Martell, although ‘Trevatt’ gets an honourable mention from Tracy Hardman.
“Somewhere between a peach and a prayer, they taste of well water and butterscotch and dried apples and desert simooms and lust.” – Diane Ackerman
A chance find in a Waikato garden, the ‘Luisa’ plum can't seem to decide if it should taste like an apricot or a peach or a tropical mango.
Few fruit trees can be relied upon to produce as prolifically and consistently as summer PLUMS.
When I asked my Facebook followers for their favourite fruit tree recommendations, it’s fair to say the results were skewed by the fact it was peak plum season at the time – and one plum in particular was on everyone’s lips: ‘Luisa’. Since her discovery in a Waikato garden, ‘Luisa’ has developed a cult following among plum aficionados who crave her uniquely large, heart-shaped, blushing red and yellow fruit with its sweet, tropical-tasting flesh reminiscent of a cocktail of apricot, mango, pawpaw and plum.
More recently, ‘Luisa’ has been crossed with the ruby red variety ‘Fortune’, which has by far the biggest fruit of all my plum trees, to produce ‘Lucy’, who combines the flavour of ‘Luisa’ with the red-streaked flesh and dark skin of ‘Fortune’. Incidentally, ‘Fortune’ makes delicious Shrewsbury-biscuit style red jam and, with only 10-12 plums to the kilogram, is quick to pick, slice and stone.
For bottling, ‘Satsuma’ was the plum of choice for many of our grandparents, with dark red, reasonably freestone fruit of a uniform size. As a fruit bowl plum, I find its skin a tad bitter, but I’m possibly spoiled for choice due to also growing sweeter eaters such as sticky ‘Sultan’, which ripens almost to black on branches that spread outward rather than upward.
‘Black Doris’ is, hands down, the most popular preserving plum in New Zealand, though this dark and delicious Kiwi heirloom doesn’t crop half as well in the north as it does in the traditional stonefruit regions of the South Island and Hawke’s Bay.
I reckon ‘Black Doris’ plums are one of the only commercial fruit crops that easily taste as good in a tin can from the supermarket as they do grown at home and lovingly bottled. I’m clearly not the only one who thinks Wattie’s ‘Black Doris’ plums are a national treasure because apparently we scoffed the shelves clear during the Covid-19 lockdown pudding craze.
‘Black Doris’ is the only variety of plum that Wattie’s is canny enough to can. According to Stuff, the company gets its ‘Black Doris’ plums from 30 Hawke’s Bay growers and they are hoping to increase production by upping their tree numbers this winter. This year I was excited to see that my own tree had produced its first crop, but demand – blimming birds! – sadly outstripped supply (see Top and Flop Crops).
I’m a wee bit biased but DAMSONS are the crop I can’t live without.
Botanists can’t agree whether damsons are a plum ( Prunus domestica subsp. insititia), or a species in their own right ( Prunus insititia). But that’s splitting hairs, as this self-fertile English heirloom has a distinct colour (dark purple with a white bloom), flavour (very tart) and size (tiny) that sets it apart from all other plums. Once you try damson jam or marzipan-flavoured damson gin liqueur, you’ll want a compact tree of your own.
I love damsons so much I wrote a book all about them. Order Damson: From Hedgerow to Harvest from foggydalefarm.co.nz.
GREENGAGES are in a league of their own.
Also worthy of singling out from their plum cousins, European greengages are at the opposite end of the sweetness spectrum to damsons, with toffee-flavoured flesh. Late to ripen (March) with a short season, choose from self-fertile ‘Reine Claude de
Bavay’ or ‘English Greengage’ and pair with the pollinator ‘Coe’s Golden Drop’, sadly one of the blandest of all yellow plums.
“There never was an apple, in Adam’s opinion, that wasn’t worth the trouble you got into for eating it.” _ Neil Gaiman
APPLES come in many shapes and sizes, from small crabs to giant English cookers.
If it’s rude to skite, then someone clearly forgot to tell every gardener who has ever planted a ‘Monty’s Surprise’ or a ‘Peasgood
Nonsuch’ apple tree. The former (a chance roadside find from Manawatu later found to have high levels of natural cancer-fighting compounds) and the latter (a famed English heirloom) both produce gigantic late fruit, routinely averaging 400-600g. However, both varieties seem a bit bland for modern sweet tooths; reserve for tarts and puds.
Sweet red apples such as ‘Royal Gala’,
‘Pacific Rose’ and ‘Lady in Red’ seem to be all the rage commercially, and once you – or your children and grandchildren – get a taste for that lolly-sweet flesh, it does seem hard to go back to appreciating the sharpness and complexity of heirloom apple varieties.
If you could only have one apple tree, however, it would have to be dependable, versatile ‘Granny Smith’, with crisp, tangy flesh that adds crunch to salads and slaws, bakes beautifully in dumplings and holds firm in pie fillings. Homegrown grannies crop over a long season – I pick mine from the tart start of February to the mellow end of May – so don’t be put off by the disappointment of a soft, insipid,
Once you couldn’t give AVOCADOS away; now they’re worth their weight in guacamole.
When I first started gardening, avocados were considered a novelty (like veganism), but now they’re a gourmet mainstay in warm, sunny, preferably frost-free gardens. Established trees can cope with mild frosts but young trees need cloth for protection. Pear-shaped ‘Hass’, which ripens to black, remains the most commonly grown variety, but ‘Cleopatra’ and ‘Hashimoto’ boast bigger fruit. My favourite is round ‘Reed’. storebought, cool-stored ‘Granny Smith’ sold many months out of that season.
For sugar-free apple sauce in a flash,
‘Sturmer Pippin’ has sweet flesh that fluffs up in a matter of minutes, while the aptly named ‘Jelly King’ is a reliable all-rounder for crabapple jelly. But it’s not nearly as pretty as the red and gold stars of southern gardens, ‘Jack Humm’ and ‘Golden Hornet’, which crop late and are so ornamental.
Nothing compares to sweet, juice-dripping, tree-ripened PEACHES, from ‘Golden Queen’ to early-ripening ‘Orion’.
They are a Kiwi heirloom but don’t be surprised if you can’t find any ‘Blackboy’ peach trees for sale in New Zealand garden centres in years to come. We are the only gardeners who know these dark-fleshed peaches by this unfortunate moniker and moves are afoot to rename the variety
‘Sanguine’ (it’s Latin for blood). In Europe, red-fleshed peaches are already known as blood peaches, with ‘Sanguine de Savoie’ (Blood of Savoy) a popular offering at late summer fruit stalls in France.
I’ve never seen them sold commercially here – perhaps because their fuzzy skins are a dull shade of brown – however I’d say (and my Facebook followers agree) that they are our most popular backyard variety. Why? Because they look and taste divine once cut, with juicy flesh that has a slightly spicy edge. They’re freestone and birds largely leave them alone, plus they sprout reliably from stones and are one of the easiest varieties to have success with in a spray-free garden. And they ripen at the very end of summer, avoiding the worst of the brown rot plague.
The runner-up, for enduring popularity, has to be ‘Golden Queen’. When I was a child, my mum bottled a crate of these large, late-ripening, orange-fleshed peaches in Agee jars every year. Introduced in 1908, ‘Golden Queen’ remains the peach by which all others are judged, for preserving at least, though its clingstone nature requires a skilled hand with a peach pitter!
‘Paragon’ is another beloved old-timer that ripens in midsummer and is sweeter for eating fresh, with yellow flesh and skin with a red blush. Judi Patrick remembers it fondly from the orchard on the Northland
“An apple is an excellent thing – until you have tried a peach.” _ George du Maurier
farm where she grew up. “That taste is still in my mouth, warm off the tree and juicy.”
Late season peaches ripen this month but many backyard trees fall victim to brown rot. This fungal disease strikes just as the fruit ripens and the spores can infect the whole tree in days, leading to a total crop loss.
Pick up any diseased fruit and apply a cleanup spray of copper in autumn (and again in late winter, just before bud burst) to keep the spores at bay.
In muggy northern areas, Sarah Frater recommends the newish variety ‘Sweet
Perfection’ for leaf curl resistance. To beat brown rot, plant early-ripening varieties such as ‘Orion’, ‘Springcrest’, ‘Wiggins’ and ‘Dixired’. The fruit is ready to pick at Christmas, before the weather gets muggy.
PEARS need a spell in your fruit bowl to fully ripen post-harvest.
Gardeners often lose patience with pear trees, as not only do they take 5-7 years to start cropping, it can be confusing judging the optimal time to pick them.
Birds got all mine for the first two seasons as I waited too long for them to soften on the tree, at which point they rotted from the inside out. Pears are ripe to pick when the jointed stem of the fruit snaps off easily with a sideways twist. Bring them indoors to finish ripening, which can take 1-2 weeks.
In my orchard, the best performing pear is boring brown (but versatile) ‘Beurre Bosc’, but for a to-die-for dessert pear ‘Doyenne
du Comice’ is unrivalled for sweet flavour.
By mid-autumn, you can’t even give spare FEIJOAS away, which is why early-ripening varieties always get the edge.
Feijoas are the gift that keeps on giving, even when everyone you know is sick of receiving them. For this reason, it’s best to overindulge early, while there is still an appetite for surplus fruit. As well as kicking off the season, ‘Kaiteri’ and ‘Kākāriki’ both have huge fruit with firm, flavoursome flesh, though ‘Anatoki’ is said to be sweeter. For an early feijoa that’s self-fertile and ideal for a hedge, go for
‘Unique’. Or for large pots and raised beds, try dwarf-ish ‘Wiki Tu’.
Pretty and productive PERSIMMONS deserve all the praise they get.
With an elegant form that offers summer shade and fiery autumn colour, persimmons are handsome landscape trees with an added extra: their glowing orange fruit hangs on the bare branches well into winter.
Early astringent varieties were an acquired taste, requiring an extended stay in the fruit bowl post-harvest to jelly their hard hearts, but non-astringent varieties such as ‘Fuyu’ are more appealing to modern palates.
Auckland gardener Dianne Moffitt adores these “fabulous fruit for eating fresh or dried” (splash with a little lime juice prior to dehydrating persimmon slices) and says they are marvellous for sharing with birds. “The beauty of the tree in all its stages, particularly its intense autumn colour and lovely fresh lime green foliage in spring, is a total bonus.”
Would you be surprised to learn that New Zealand’s most moreish FIGS are all blacks?
If there’s any such thing as a perfect fig, ‘Brunoro Black’ is its name. During fresh fig season, this dark purple-black fig with deep pink-red flesh is the most popular choice at the farmers market stalls run by Te Mata Figs in Hawke’s Bay. “It has the perfect balance of fig flavour and sweetness,” says Helen Walker, and it’s just the right size to pop into your mouth, serve halved on a salad, fill with goat cheese and wrap in prosciutto, or poach whole.
Nothing puts off a first-time fig-eater quite like biting into an underripe green fig, which might explain why gardeners prefer to grow varieties that ripen to black. Helen’s personal favourite is the French ‘Pastiliere’, which matures to blue-black with deep pink flesh.
Tree supplier Sarah Frater concurs that black figs are always flavour of the month for her mail order customers. Her best sellers are ‘Brunoro Black’, plus ‘Black Mission’ and
‘Black’, a small, super sweet, dark-skinned, pink-fleshed fig from the Koanga Collection. Early ripening, basic ‘Black’ suits marginal climates with shorter, cooler summers.
If you can convince your tastebuds not to judge a fig by its cover, Helen Walker and Sarah Frater both have a soft spot for Adriatic figs, such as ‘Ventura’, whose plain green skins give no clue to the delicious red flesh, with a sweet strawberry jam flavour, inside.
The fig season is in full swing this month and continues through April, so if you fancy taste-testing Te Mata Figs’ 30-odd varieties to select your favourite, visit the new Figgery Cafe at 205 Napier Road, Havelock North, or check out their stalls at the Napier Urban Farmers’ Market (Saturdays) or the Hawke’s Bay Farmers’ Market in Hastings (Sundays).
White-fleshed NECTARINES apparently make our mouths water more than their yellow cousins.
Whenever I think of nectarines, I think of Dolly Parton. “I love bald men,” the country superstar once quipped. “Just because you’ve lost your fuzz don’t mean you ain’t a peach.” That’s 100 per cent correct for nectarines too; they are naturally mutant peaches with a recessive gene that gives them their smooth skins. Peeled into a fruit salad, it’s impossible to tell the difference between the two.
Sarah Frater recommends the nectarine varieties ‘Spring Red’ and ‘Fantasia’, both of which crop well in low-chill conditions. ‘Spring Red’ ripens early in the new year and has semi-clingstone flesh under bright red skins, while ‘Fantasia’ has large, juicy, yellow and red freestone fruit in February. Both have juicy, golden flesh, which, for some reason, Kiwi gardeners don’t seem to rate as highly as white-fleshed varieties. Is it because yellow-fleshed nectarines are sold more widely in fruit shops, where they can end up overripe and squishy, that we prefer their paler cousins which are picked at home while the flesh is still firm?
For a summer supply of white-fleshed nectarines, plant a grove that includes ‘Snow Queen’ (early), ‘Goldmine’ (mid-season, and confusingly named given it has greenish-white flesh and skins that ripen to green overlaid with red) and ‘Theo Ching’ (late).
My favourite nectarine is ‘Mabel’, who boasts the same stunning claret-red foliage as Cercis canadensis ‘Forest Pansy’, but with fruit as a bonus. ‘Mabel’ has fruit that’s almost as dark as her leaves.
Like peaches, all nectarines are notorious for blistering with leaf curl in spring. A preventive spray regime with copper is important.
Grow QUINCES for poaching, paste and autumn puddings.
I regret planting five ‘Syrmna’ quinces. Don’t get me wrong, I love quinces. But in autumn, all five of those trees are laden with fruit – and there’s a limit as to how many kilograms I can use. Last year as they ripened during the lockdown, I was stuck with them; I shall forever associate the smell of hundreds of slowly rotting fallen quinces with Covid-19.
However, Yvonne Blanch and Jeanie Lowe are correct when they describe quinces as a multi-sensory delight. “A very easy tree to care for, with lovely flowers and autumn colour, and you don’t have to bat away the birds,” says Jeanie, who bottles her quinces with feijoas and apples, or spices stewed fruit to serve with cream or yoghurt.
Yvonne also raves over “the scent, taste and amazing transformation of the flesh when cooked, from cream to eye-popping red.” She rates Annabel Langbein’s dual recipe for quince jelly and paste (online at annabel-langbein.com), but reserves the strained pulp, not for paste, but for a delicious crumble. Top the pulp with a 1:1:2 ratio of butter, sugar and dry ingredients, such as flour, nuts and oats.
Take your pick from Turkish ‘Smyrna’,
French ‘Giant of Gascony’, the American heirloom ‘Van Deman’ or the New Zealand selection ‘Taihape’. To be honest, all quinces – even the anonymous rootstock of many grafted pears – are prolific croppers, as well as hardy and fairly tolerant of wet soil.
It goes without saying that every Kiwi backyard needs a lemon tree, but which other CITRUS trees are essential?
When I asked my gardening friends to limit their fruit tree recommendations to a single variety, most cheekily decided to assume that citrus didn’t count, because lemons are such everyday essentials that we can’t imagine our backyards without them. “Excluding the lemon, which I couldn’t do without…” was a common sentiment.
The hybrid ‘Meyer’, which is cold hardier than its true cousins, is rarely without fruit in my Hunua garden, and a single well-grown tree produces all the fruit most families need. Should I – very occasionally – need to buy a lemon, I’m incensed by their cost! However, ‘Meyer’ lemons lack the volatile acidity and instant-aromatherapy zest of true lemons such as ‘Yen Ben’, ‘Lisbon’ and ‘Villa Franca’, any one of which should be considered a must-have for making lemonade cordial and lemon-flavoured desserts. “I use at least one lemon every day of the year,” said Ali Howard, “in drinking water, sweet and savoury dishes, lemonade and as a garnish.” Or squeezed “on fish, in a Corona beer when the limes run out, in lemon cake, with gin, in dressings…” added Lisa Marcroft. “For lemon curd and lemon meringue pie, lemon poppyseed muffins and pancakes, lemon-blueberry muffins, sweet tea with lemon juice, lemon juice on fruits to stop them browning, and in place of vanilla essence in baking,” added Margaret Russell. Note that oval-shaped ‘Meyer’ lemons tend to have much brighter golden skins than true lemons, which ripen to a dull yellow and often have a pointy end. All lemons are susceptible to the fungal issue known as citrus verrucosis, or citrus scab, which is largely cosmetic but a pain when zesting.
When New Zealand-grown lemons are in short supply, imported fruit can cost $1 each, but that’s nothing on the price you’ll pay for out-of-season limes, which skyrocket to $50 per kilogram (or more) in summer. Growing your own limes means you can freeze the fruit whole and thaw as required for ceviche and cocktails. Tahitian limes crop from winter into spring, when their small green fruit ripens fully to lemon-yellow. Tahitian limes can take up to five years to produce fruit, however, while the ‘Bearrs’ selection is quicker to crop.
It’s a shame the knobbly fruit of the kaffir or Makrut lime tastes faintly of kerosene – I’m yet to find any palatable purpose for them – but it doesn’t really matter because these trees are grown for their fragrant winged leaves for curries and aromatic rice dishes.
Mandarins are a matter of personal taste and your tolerance for pips and peeling, but
‘Miho’, ‘Satsuma’ and ‘Aoshima’ are all sweet to snack on and easy to get into, while old-fashioned ‘Clementine’ is a devil to peel (slice it instead) but has the best flavour. I’d personally consider a ‘Golden Special’
grapefruit tree to be a must-have for juicing and breakfast fruit, but I’m in the minority, as so many modern medicines clash with these once ubiquitous citrus fruit.
It takes a special knack – and a very cooperative climate – to grow your own juicy POMEGRANATES.
With their leathery red cricket-ball skins and juicy, jewel-like arils, it’s hard to think of a more exotic – or expensive – fruit crop than pomegranates. But during the years that Gisborne growers Dean and Sheree MacFarlane worked in the Middle East, they were as abundantly available as autumn feijoas are at home. “Our kids were raised on pomegranates,” Dean recalls. “We’d buy cartons of 50 or 60 at a time and scoop them all out into a big bowl in the fridge.”
When the MacFarlanes returned to New Zealand 14 years ago, they planted an orchard at Te Karaka, inland from Gisborne, in which they planted “one of pretty much every variety of fruit and nut tree you can think of”, with 370 pomegranates on the side.
That punt on pomegranates is now paying off, with a successful autumn harvest that’s snapped up by greengrocers and chefs. Dean says their best fruit gets to 700-800g, although most are the size of a large orange. The fruit ripens in April; if you happen to be driving through Te Karaka on State Highway 2 next month, look out for the sign pointing to their roadside stall on Pitcher Road.
Pomegranates grow into small, straggly looking trees but they have long, thin thorns, making the ‘Wonderful’ variety anything but wonderful to maintain. “They aren’t pleasant to work with,” Dean admits. “When I mow the grass around our orchard I end up squeezing spikes out of my arms and legs.”
In most parts of New Zealand, pomegranates are a marginal crop; although they will successfully flower and form fruit in many areas, that fruit stays small – about the size of a tennis ball – and rarely ripens fully before temperatures fall in autumn.
The trees do best in climates with moist springs, hot summers and dry autumns as, if there’s heavy rain in the weeks before the fruit nears maturity, the hard skins will split. In the MacFarlanes’ orchard, a wet spell causes thousands of fruit to split (not that they mind too much, as they eat all the second-grade fruit they can).
There’s also a trick to cracking each fruit to unleash every one of those glowing red arils from the honeycomb-like white walls: cut the end off, score down the sides of the six segments and the fruit should open out like a flower, says Dean.
In many cultures, the glassy red seeds of pomegranates were traditionally revered as symbols of sanctity, fertility, and abundance.