Feijoa – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acca_sellowiana

Sometimes called pineapple guava or fruit salad guava due to the taste.

This is a really hardy and productive but under rated fruit tree.

The bush is an evergreen from the Andes in South America and grows to be a small tree or large bush. It can be hedged or grown as a small tree. The grow to about 3-4 metres high and wide eventually in good environments.

You need to let them ripen fully before eating them or they have a gritty sour taste. You eat the central pulp no the skin as this stays sour and gritty. When it’s brown and squishy it’s best. The fruit ripens off the tree so you can pick then and let them ripen in a bowl for about a week.  They are soft to the touch and smell very fragrant when ripe.

Fruit will start to drop when ripe. So it’s a good idea to leave them till the first ones start to drop on the ground and get soft.

Goes well with apple and rhubarb or just ice-cream. The pulp freezes really well and seems to get better with time. The juice is great mixed with apple.

The flowers look very attractive and the petals can be eaten and taste quite good and sort of like cinamon.

I hand pollinate the flowers with a paint brush when I get the time, which helps, but they seem to flower and fruit profusely after about the 3rd year.

They flower and fruit mainly on the outside of the bush or where it’s best exposed to sunlight. So hedging is actually a good way to grow them as they continue to fruit on the outside of the hedge. They stay on the tree growing for a long time.

They seem to grow perfectly fine in a wide range of climates. We get snow for about 2 weeks of the year and temps above 35c for about 3-4 weeks of the year. This variation seems to suit them well.

They  lots of food like dynamic lifter and compost that provides lots of nutrients. I also mulch underneath with lucerne.

They like lots of water to crop heavily but seem to get on ok with average rainfall.

The varieties vary a fair bit in size and taste.

They are almost impossible to grow from cutting unless you use the full propagation treatment with heating and gels etc. I have not successfully grown cutting yet after trying for several years. The seeds seem to germinate and grow ok but are very slow to germinate and grow to start with.

Growing up I remember sitting under small local trees or the ones we had growing as a hedge along a driveway at home, eating them by picking them up and breaking them in half and squishing the fruit pulp out. This about sums up the best way to eat them.