Edibles in the Landscape

This is a nice article about growing food in the east bay.  We have a little more frost than they do but the writer is inspiring and suggests joining the CRFG club for a lot of fruity fun.

http://www.ediblecommunities.com/eastbay/winter12/tangential-journey.htm

I love this time of year.  I look forward to eating pomegranate arils and making dark red juice to store for months to come.  There are some good tricks for juicing without making a red splatter mess.  One is to pick them after they have started to crack open.  If left on the tree long after that it will start to dry out or worse so get it picked.  Pulling apart the fruit under water in a big bowl or pot is a great method because all the great fleshy seeds sink to the bottom and all the parts we don’t eat, like the peel and spongy pulp, float so that makes them easy to separate.  Eat them like this or rub them into a colander so the juice goes into a bowl.  Then the seeds can be squeezed in cheesecloth to get the last bit of juice off of them.  I put the juice into jars to store in the frige or freezer for later.  What a treat.  It takes a lot of time but to me it is worth it.  Poms are very easy to grow, have great flowers in the spring, awesome fruit, yellow fall leaf color and no pests around here and have low water needs.  It is more of a shrub or bush than a tree and it can be kept small.  Some people train it to be a tree by always cutting off the extra trunks and get less fruit that way.

Feijoa, also known as Pineapple Guava and Guavasteen, are one of my favorite fruits.  It is great that here in Napa we can grow this guava without protecting it from winter frosts like we have to do with the other guavas.  The petals are edible and the fruit is just now starting to drop.  It is ripe and is collected from the ground as soon as you can.  The texture of the flesh is like a pear but the taste is a cross of a pineapple, a banana and a strawberry.  The skin can be eaten or not.  It has been an important commercial crop in Australia and New Zealand for 100 years but is hardly known in the states.  It is origianally from Central and South America.  I love Feijoa.

Click here to hear pronunciation of Feijoa.

This is a good year for figs.  Everyone I talked to about them said their trees did well this year too.  Some varieties produce figs twice a year.  Figs can be green or purple and the inside can be white to deep dark red-purple.  Figs make fruit when the tree is still quite young and fig trees have few problems.  Train a tree with lower branches so you can prune and pick fruit easier reducing the need to work on a ladder.  Extra fruits can be dried to enjoy later on and many people like to barbeque them.  I like to add them fresh or dried to salads.  It is hard to buy fresh figs in a store because they are so soft and can over-ripen too fast and they can be kept large or small to fit your space.

Finger Limes are getting to be popular.  Stop by the farm if you want to try them.  People call them “lime caviar” because inside the green/black/pink skin are hundreds of crisp tiny sour vesicles of juicy goodness.  The flowers are pink/white and tiny and the leaves are much smaller than other citrus trees have.

 It is naturally found in Australia and is very popular with chefs who like it as an attractive garnish for hors d’oeuvres, seafoods esp sushi or added to a salad or a salad dressing for a tangy pop when you bite them.

They are an understory tree or bush and so hot full sun may be too much for them.  They need protection from frost so we cover them on the cold nights or they can be placed in a frost free section of your yard with some sun or near the house to benefit from the warmth at night.  This is a fun fruit to try.

I love the taste of both the flower and the fruit of the Pineapple Guava aka Feijoa.  It is often seen as a foundation plant near homes as it is a very nice shrub – keeping it’s leaves year round with awesome looking flowers at this time of year.  Some have had the plant for years and not tried the fruit.  Here’s a suggestion – try tasting the flower petals too!  Don’t go overboard on that though and eat too many or you will not have the fantastic fruit in the fall.  I think the fruit tastes like strawberry + pineapple + kiwi.  It has a good sour to sweet balance so maybe you will like it if sour is okay with you for fruit.  Many people have not tried it but like it when they do.  It is such a sweet looking plant too.  The thick leaves are whitish on the backside and glossy on the top.  Even though it is called a guava it can handle frost and I do not cover it like I do for citrus, avocados, other guavas and bananas.   I have a set of trees (bushes) selected to have larger than usual fruit in both round and long versions.   Add this to an evergreen edible hedge with citrus, loquats and avocados.

The apriums are blended stone fruits – blended the old fashioned way.  They ripen after the cherries but before the apricots, plums, and peaches.  To me, the taste is close to an apricot which makes sense as it is more apricot than plum.  So far it has been easier for me to grow apriums than apricots.  This is a picture of Flavor Delight Aprium.  It resembles an apricot but with a distinctive flavor and texture all its own and has a pleasant, lingering aftertaste. Early June is the expected ripeness time.  Spread the food ripening out to cover all the months of the year!

The Grapefruit and Pummelo flowers are extra large for a citrus and also very fragrant!  Some varieties are blooming now and walking past the blooms always turns heads.