That's a fascinating tidbit about the tree. So the fruit is edible, just not delicious? I suppose it could theoretically be bred to produce a more sweet variety of fruit?
Louis Glowinski, a Melbourne resident, published a spectacular book about growing fruit in Australia back in 2008 [1] -- it's a marvellous read, especially for the domestic geographical references, as well as the proper alignment of months to seasons (obviously most other works are from the northern hemisphere, and the prevalence of things like 'pick these in late July' which need to be mentally rot-6'd, gets tiring real fast).
Anyway, there's a couple of probably unintended running jokes in that book -- the phrases 'highly variable' and 'good for jams' are frequently used when it feels like he's trying to be polite about good, but often far from great, fruit.
I recall he used both phrases for this species.
I think with a lot of these kinds of fruit trees that haven't been carefully selected over centuries, you don't have lots of named varieties, and consequently they're usually grown from seed rather than grafted, so in turn, combined with climate and soil variations, it's a bit of a pot-luck on whether you have great, or merely edible, fruit.
So, yes, you're right, we could start breeding better varieties, but this is an expensive pursuit for tree crops, and few are engaged in it these days.
Apples get a bit of attention (look at the Cosmic Crisp f.e.) and citrus too, but realistically most of humanity's diet today is based around species selected by hunter-gatherers ~11k years ago.
Comments
That's a fascinating tidbit about the tree. So the fruit is edible, just not delicious? I suppose it could theoretically be bred to produce a more sweet variety of fruit?
Louis Glowinski, a Melbourne resident, published a spectacular book about growing fruit in Australia back in 2008 [1] -- it's a marvellous read, especially for the domestic geographical references, as well as the proper alignment of months to seasons (obviously most other works are from the northern hemisphere, and the prevalence of things like 'pick these in late July' which need to be mentally rot-6'd, gets tiring real fast).
Anyway, there's a couple of probably unintended running jokes in that book -- the phrases 'highly variable' and 'good for jams' are frequently used when it feels like he's trying to be polite about good, but often far from great, fruit.
I recall he used both phrases for this species.
I think with a lot of these kinds of fruit trees that haven't been carefully selected over centuries, you don't have lots of named varieties, and consequently they're usually grown from seed rather than grafted, so in turn, combined with climate and soil variations, it's a bit of a pot-luck on whether you have great, or merely edible, fruit.
So, yes, you're right, we could start breeding better varieties, but this is an expensive pursuit for tree crops, and few are engaged in it these days.
Apples get a bit of attention (look at the Cosmic Crisp f.e.) and citrus too, but realistically most of humanity's diet today is based around species selected by hunter-gatherers ~11k years ago.
[1] https://www.booktopia.com.au/the-complete-book-of-fruit-grow...