| Scientific Name | Common Name | Brief Description | Cultivars |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total | Minimum 13 Different Tasties. Where you go from here is up to you! | ||
| Musa | Banana | Right now I only have a few banana trees. They are the common little banana that you see most often. They originally came from a pup I dug out of an empty lot behind a friends house. I was probably 13-14 or so then. I would like to have some more variety of banana, and perhaps some drawf ornamentals to grow in containers as well. | 'Dwarf Cavendish' 'Lady Finger' |
| Litchi chinensis | Lychee | These are a great fruit if you like really sweet stuff. The fruit has white juicy flesh, a thin hard red shell, and is about the size of a golf ball. From what I can remember they only contain one seed, but I could be wrong. I have two small seed sprouts that I picked up at the '05 USF Fall Plant Sell for five bucks. Later this year I am going to get one that is more mature or grafted that way I won't have to wait for these to start producing. | |
| Eriobotyrya japonica | Japanese Loquat | The fruit from the loquat is sweet too, but with a tangy quality to it. The orange fruit on this is smallish, usually with three seeds in it sometimes four, and is fuzzy but not as much as a peach. I have one of these that I got from Greenfest at the University of Tampa in the spring of '04. It was about 2.5' tall when I bought it, and is grafted. It is over 6' now('06). When you buy grafted plants that usually means you get fruit sooner, and you know the cultivar. | |
| Ficus carica | Common Fig | The fruit from the fig isn't a fruit at all, but a mass of inverted fleshy flowers. I call them fruit for the sake of simplicity. The opening at the bottom of the fruit is there so that the fig wasp can get in and pollenate the flowers. Some fig cultivars don't have an opening. I bought one of these at the '05 Greenfest. | 'Brown Turkey' 'Black Mission' 'Genoa' |
| Citrus sinensis | Blood Orange | The Blood Orange is a cultivar of the Navel Orange. To achieve the red color in the flesh you need to have cold nights and warmer days. Which I don't get in Tampa, but it should still fruit just fine. I got this from the '05 USF Fall Plant Sell too. It's about 2' tall right now, and it's grafted I'm pretty sure. I love citrus, and would like to have more variety, but with the increased hurricane activity an citrus canker I'm not sure that it would be wise to invest to much in citrus trees. I'll probably still go for it though. | 'Valencia' 'Joppa' 'Washington Navel' |
| Eugenia uniflora | Surinam Cherry | I don't have any of these yet, but from reading books an the different garden forums it sounds like an interesting plant. From what I've read it gets a mass of white flowers before it sets dark red fruit about the size of a small tomato. It's a slow growing shrubby tree. New leaves are a bronze color, I'm thinking a color like a mangos new leaves. There is also E. brasiliensis to consider. It has white flowers, but with black cherry-sized fruit that takes only a month to ripen. I might grow these in large pots if they won't survive in the ground. | |
| Ananas comosus | *Pineapple | Pineapples are very easy to grow from the green tops of the store bought fruit. All you have to do is cut away the flesh from around the base of the leaves. Then just stick it in a cup of water on a windowsill, not in direct sunlight, and wait for some roots to show up. Then plant it in a pot. After that they take full sun just fine. I've tried to grow them in the ground, but have had no success that's why I grow mine in pots. Though I do know people that grow them in the ground just fine. They take about 2yrs to fruit, and each plant will produce one fruit. That's a good reason to have many of them started at different times. | 'Porteanus' 'Variegatus' |
| Vaccinium ashei | RabbitEye Blueberry | ||
| Malpighia glabra | Barbados Cherry | ||