Pineapple guava

Winter fruits 2

More winter fruits while I’m catching up on posts (and scheduling them so you aren’t inundated…)

These things are great! They’re Feijoa sellowiana, or pineapple guava.

They are ready to pick when they fall off the trees in the wind. There is a pair of trees (you need a male and female tree to get fruit) on my regular commute to church, so I start looking out for them a week or two before Christmas and stop to put them in my pockets. I take them home, keep them at room temperature until they get soft (usually a couple of weeks), cut them in half, and scoop out the flesh with a teaspoon. If they’re underripe they can be fairly astringent but once they’re ripe they are creamy and they taste of, well, pineapple and guava. Delicious!

Unfortunately I only know of one pair of trees (and as usual I’m not telling you where they are), if there were more of these as street trees I could experiment with other ways of eating them. They seem to ripen faster than the kiwis, so with a bit of care around timing there’s no reason we couldn’t have a tropical fruit salad.