The tastiness of loquats notwithstanding, we found something in our garden this spring that rates at least two notches higher on the pie scale.
I’ve been growing Surinam cherry trees for more than 20 years, but only as container plants until the last five. It started when I bought a small seedling from a botanical garden in Southern California in 1986. The garden’s mother tree was probably 25 or 30 feet tall, but these plants are more often grown as hedges or shrubs in the Caribbean and Central and South America, where they originate. They put out beautiful but tiny white powder-puff flowers that morph into what look like tiny green pumpkins. These grow to about the size of sour pie cherries and turn bright red. You really need to let them get as ripe as possible for the best eating; otherwise they taste a bit like a lemon-cherry combo. There’s also an indescribable kind of spicy tang that some people apparently find objectionable, but we really like. The fruits are packed with vitamins A and C, and various trace minerals.
My little tree produced a couple dozen cherries after about three years, by which time I was living in Arkansas and dealing with occasional actual snow and temperatures in the teens in the winter. I planted the cherry pits, and about 18 of them sprouted. I put these in pots along the south side of my house, and left them out that winter. Literature says the plants are hardy to 28 degrees, and established trees may be hardy to 22. About six of my seedlings lived through a winter that saw the temps dip into the mid teens a few times.
I kept one of those cold-hardy seedlings and my original tree in large pots, and moved them with me over the next few years. I lost the original, but still had the seedling when we moved into our place here on the river back in 2003. With our mild winters, it seemed safe to plant it in the ground.
It was. It’s underneath a big pecan and probably would like a little more sun, but the Surinam cherry tree now is about 12 feet high, and this year it had its first bumper crop of cherries. I won’t go into recipe details, but suffice it to say these tart cherries make as fine a berry pie as you’re likely to find anywhere. Substitute them in your favorite recipe if you happen to be lucky enough to have a tree.
I was so impressed with the taste that I planted a new crop of seeds, which haven’t yet come up (germination takes three to four weeks).
Everyone is not impressed with this tree, however, and in southern Florida they are on the invasive plant list. That means they’ve been observed crowding out native plants, which is hard to believe from my experience, because these tree-shrubs are so slow-growing. I don’t know of any other state that has so labeled the Surinam. Here, I’ve never observed seeds sprouting on their own, but of course animals could carry them a long way out of sight. The birds, perhaps too busy watching all our figs ripen, seem to leave our Surinam cherries alone.
I have plans to try them as a hedge in the front yard. Any time I can replace a purely ornamental shrub with something that gives back fruit as tasty and healthy as these cherries, I’m going to give it a try.
