Fruit trees for Uganda

Jambula fruit are interesting. They originated in India but spread all across Africa with Indian immigrants and traders. The fruits are small (about the size of a juicy grape) and dark purple- almost black. Village children often eat the fruit right off the tree, while adults most commonly boil the fruits with a bit of salt. 

Jambula are most closely related to plums, but they taste like olives, which does not make sence to me at all. Fortunately, people in the village LOVE them and they are a great source of vitamins and fiber. As they have a very low retail value ( about 2 cups of the fruit sells for about $0.03) they are not worth selling, so we are giving out the seedlings just so people can eat the fruit!

We have a large jambula tree on our farm and we harvest the seeds and fruits (which were not gathered up by village children, squirrels, and birds) to grow seedlings, which we give out to the villagers. Fortunately the tree starts fruiting in about 3 years- so the villagers do not have to wait long!

Links:

• Grassroots Uganda Facebook Page

The star apple was another little treasure that was introduced to us at Najib’s farm. It is a sweet fruit local to Asia that is completely unrelated to the apple but has a similar shape only in the essence that it is round.

Evidently, if you slice the star apple in half, the seeds in the center make a perfect star- hence giving this fruit part of its name. Of course we just decided to take bites out of it, so the star design was lost on us.

As none of us had ever seen this fruit before, we dug up about 20 small seedlings from around the parent tree and we have planted them at our farm. The seedlings are nearly as tall as me now, and we have no idea what the market for the fruits will be like as they seem to be a new addition to Uganda. But we are going to try, and if things go well then all of our surrounding villagers will have star apple trees as well.

Links:

• Grassroots Uganda Facebook Page