HOT FRUIT! Fourth week of April 2024

I feel as if we are really into the hot season now despite an unexpected unusually misty morning this morning. Despite the mist the sun was really hot by 9.00am and this to me is what distinguishes the hot season from other times of the year.

Hot season is the time of fruit and this week we had out first crop of chikkus which are sometimes known as Sapota.

In the last two blogs I have been talking about the various sorts of seed saving we have been doing. For chikku, provided the fruit is ripe enough to eat the seeds are ripe enough to be taken out of the fruit, washed, dried and then bagged up for saving. No extra work is needed such as that required for saving brinjal or tomato seeds.

Chikku trees can produce twice yearly, once during the hot season. They are large and productive trees which don't need to be watered. Making them a good choice of fruit tree to have in the water stressed area of Auroville.

The fruit looks like large berries and when you see them in the shop it is easy to mistake them for small potatoes. They have to be picked unripe and this is the best way of buying them. As when they are hard like this they don't bruise. A good way to make sure that they ripen evenly is to put them in a bag of uncooked rice. Chikku have a very sweet taste but make sure they are properly soft before eating them. Otherwise they could be full of saponin (a type of tannin) which tastes very astringent. Nutritionally, however, tannin is a potent anti-inflammatory.

A fruit we watch carefully at this time of year are pineapples. We are watching them as they grow and ripen but also thinking about what pineapple we will be planting for the next year.

Europeans first found pineapples on the island of Guadeloupe and in Brazil where it is thought to have originated. The Spanish introduced the fruit to the Philippines and to Hawaii and it is now grown throughout the tropical areas of the world. The pineapple is an example of what is known as a multiple fruit as each ‘eye’ of the pineapple is in fact a separate fruit which press together around a central core to form what appears to be a single large fruit. The pineapple will grow with little water and on a poor soil, so is an excellent crop for the Auroville environment.

The pineapple is a herbaceous perennial which in the Auroville area is quite small because of the low rainfall. In areas with more rain the plant can grow up to 1.5 meters high. It consists of a circle of hard, rather sharp pointed leaves around a central stem from which the pineapple grows – generally one each year. Although I am interested to see if two per year can be grown in Malaysia because of it having more rainfall there.

As can be seen from the picture our pineapples are still quite red as they have a few weeks growing still to do before they ripen into their usual orange/yellow colour. A lot of our pineapples this year have what look like small plants growing either around the base of the fruit as above. Or across the top as below.

In both cases when we harvest the pineapples we take off these growths and plant them in the soil to grow into new pineapple plants. That is how we have kept our pineapple growing year after year after we collected our first pineapple tops from a fruit place in Puducherry.