Taken for granted
IFIND IT DIFFICULT to understand how you could prefer smoothies to champagne, but you can at least drink them for breakfast. I’ve never been a great smoothie drinker, but The Landscaper had a bit of a thing for them a couple of years ago and came up with some spectacular flavour combinations. And the great thing about them is, they use up fruit that otherwise gets taken for granted.
We have taken-for-granted fruit trees in our orchard, and I have resolved that this year I am going to make use of them. So instead of pandering to the failing peach, nectarine and apple trees which I am hoping will soon die and release me from the need to try to nurture them, I will take care of the easy trees.
It’s ironic that we (well, some of us) value the varieties that are picky, badly behaved and unreliable in the extreme, while ignoring those that live on the smell of an oily rag and produce copious amounts of fruit without asking for a thing.
So look out loquat, guava and feijoa — you’re about to be pampered. If I can remember where you’re planted, that is.
We have three loquat trees and I have no idea where they came from. There’s one across the road from us so I imagine it generously shared its seed and gave us the healthy specimens I am now about to cosset.
I have picked and eaten the fruit while meandering around the garden midsummer, and they taste like a cross between a peach and a mango.
And the trees themselves are quite good-looking — evergreen with large, wellshaped leaves, white flowers and a sweet, heady fragrance that can apparently be smelled from quite a distance.
Our loquats — clever things — have sited themselves in ideal conditions. They like to be warm, sheltered, protected from frost when young, and planted in well-drained soil. They’re not greedy, so you could fertilise them maybe once a year. Having
said that, ours have never been fertilised and they produce so much fruit we happily share it with the birds.
Our red guava is also a ring-in from goodness-knows-where. I would never have planted it because when I first came to the Far North I’d never even heard of them, but it’s doing well in its self-chosen location and is producing masses of fruit right now.
Evidently they like a constant heavy mulch to feed the roots and a good supply
of moisture, but mine has never been mulched and whatever water it’s had has come out of the sky. And over the past few months, that certainly hasn’t been much. South of the Bombay Hills, your guava, which is a subtropical, will need protection from frost.
Guava are self-pollinating if you have cooperative bees, and the snow-white flowers that arrive in autumn are delicately scented. Embarrassingly, I’ve never even noticed that. Smacked hand.
They ripen fast so daily picking is good, but if, like us, there’s only two of you to eat them, you’d better sort out some friends to take the surplus. And I am promising yet again that this year I am going to make guava fruit paste to use up a few more.
If red’s not your colour, go for a yellow guava. It’s a smaller, spreading tree, evergreen and quite vigorous, and it’ll grow between two and four metres tall. It generally fruits between April and July.
When I first moved here about 20 years ago I’d barely met a feijoa, but within weeks neighbours and new friends were foisting off their surplus feijoas on me and I liked them far more than kiwifruit.
Although it’s treated as a Kiwi icon, the feijoa is actually a sub-tropical South American native that made landfall here in the early 1900s. Back then the bright red flowers were far more appreciated than the fruit, and I still think the colour rivals the po¯ hutukawa.
If you want one (or three, or five, or a hedge) of your own, now’s the time to plant. They like sun, good drainage and pretty much any old soil will do. There are new dwarf varieties that are very suited to tubs on terraces, or on small sections.
Speaking of which, most varieties of feijoa need a pollinator. Even self-fertile varieties will benefit from pollination with another variety, producing even bigger crops. As if we need more!