Last weekend Rachel and I took a hike down to the beach . I had an later motive for the hike , as I ’d blemish a strange tree fruiting along the route and wanted to revisit it and take photos .
Here are the movie :
The fruit look rather like a loquat or some form of strange fig , bond upright off the side of the tree . I found one that was lenient and decided to open up it and take pictures of the interior .
The aroma of the yield was pleasant and it look like it might be edible ; however , if you ’ve done any wild plant foraging , you cognise it ’s a very bad idea to take a chomp out of a unfounded works without knowing for sure if it ’s eatable .
That ’s how you terminate up with your pharynx closing up , or worse , death .
I pick a 2nd fruit and took a picture of it next to the one I ’d spread :
Down at the beach I caught some hermit Cancer for the baby to see , plus we picked some kaffir lime leaves from a tree at an abandoned homestead . The total prison term I was hike up , though , I maintain wondering about the unearthly fruit I ’d launch .
And , most significantly , CAN WE use up IT ?
When I got home I started track down . After some abortive hunting for idiomatic expression like “ yield tone like loquat ” and “ what the heck is this weird , grueling , ellipse thing I found , ” I settle to judge the plant family itinerary .
I mean it might be aMoraceaeat first glance , but the aroma had a slight speck of noni and the leaf arrangement seem like it might be aRubiaceae .
I was going through the various genus , slice by while , looking for exposure . There are 611 genera inRubiaceae , however , so after a while , I just called a local friend who literally write the Bible on wild plants in my area .
On my verbal description , he ace down the specie in about five arcsecond .
Genipa americana .
I give thanks him , and after talking about various works for another 20 minutes , I hang up and started hunting down information on the species . My go - to blockade for works knowledge is Useful Tropical Plants , which is Ken Fern ’s online horticultural knowledge library .
There I read :
“ Genipa is an evergreen tree diagram with a dense , spreading pate , handsome leaf and expectant showy bloom ; it usually farm up to 20 meter marvelous , with occasional specimens to 30 metres . The bole is unremarkably straight , 30 – 80 centimetre in diameter . The comestible fruit is harvested from the state of nature for local utilization , whilst the tree diagram is also utilized for its good tone wood , medicative purposes and various other uses . It is often civilise for its fruit , and is unremarkably naturalize for its decorative time value and for the shade it can provide . ” ( link )
For some strange reason , this part stood out to me :
So I took the soft yield I ’d give for the picture and tasted it . To my delight , it was quite respectable – though also quite sickly .
Green Deanereports :
“ TheGenipa clusiifolia(JEN - ni - puh kloo - si - FOH - lee - uh ) fruit is eatable only when black ripe , and then only the flesh , not the seeds . It ’s actually a Chuck Berry the size of it of a lime . You “ eat ” it by poke a handle in the tough Rhein and sucking out the pulp . ( Again , do n’t wipe out the seeds , they will make you switch up . ) The flavor remind some of prunes , others of liquorish . Many recover it just plain awful .
While the with child majority of the plant on this site are available throughout much of America , this is a South Florida , Caribbean native . Its Caribbean full cousin , theGenipa americana , is used to make a vernacular drink among the islands . ”
I ’ve never seen anyone using this fruit here , so that use must be an island thing unknown to topical anesthetic . In fact , I asked a few locals about the fruit when I first spotted it – before my return trip with Rachel , a baby and a photographic camera – and they state me it was a “ hotdog sapodilla plum , ” and knew nothing about it being edible by people .
Unlike theG. clusiifoliaGreen Deane write about , theG. americanafruit I sample was yummy when simply soft – not black ripe / borderline rotten .
It does n’t attend to me a crack productive tree diagram , but I still think I ’ll tote up one to my land . Growing them from cum will be fun . I ’ll wager the tree can be go on short with judicious pruning .
If you ’re a bit bored one afternoon and in lookup of something fat to do , I highly recommend going for a raise and bringing along a camera , then seeing if you may ID some of the plants you see . Who knows – you might find a new pabulum !
