Pineapple Guava

A tough evergreen shrub that doubles as a hedge and a fruit crop: silver-backed leaves, extraordinary edible flowers, and aromatic fruit that tells you it is ripe by falling off. Hardy to about 12F, and one of the most trouble-free edibles you can plant.

Full sun, well-drained soil, and a decision at planting about hedge versus fruit. Check whether your cultivar is self-fertile - many need a second, different plant within about 20 feet.

Give it full sun for the heaviest crops (it grows perfectly well in part sun and simply fruits less), well-drained soil of almost any type including poor and sandy ground, and shelter from the harshest wind at the cold edge of its range. It tolerates coastal salt and urban conditions well. Autumn planting suits mild-winter regions; spring planting suits zone 8, so the roots have a full season before cold.

The decision that matters most is made at planting: hedge or crop? Flowers form on the current season's growth, so a plant sheared tight two or three times a year will look immaculate and fruit almost not at all. Grown as an open shrub or trained into a small multi-trunked tree, or clipped only once immediately after harvest, it gives you both. A great many disappointed owners of a fruitless pineapple guava are simply owners of a well-trimmed hedge.

The second decision is pollination. Cultivars vary genuinely: Coolidge, Nikita and Unique set worthwhile crops alone, while Mammoth, Triumph and Apollo flower beautifully and set very little without a second, different cultivar within about twenty feet. Even the self-fertile ones crop more heavily with a partner. Seedling plants are cheap and common but unpredictable in fruit quality and slow to bear — buy a named cultivar if you care about the fruit, and buy two if you have room. Finally, be honest about your summers: this plant comes from cool highlands, needs a modest amount of winter chill, and fruits poorly in the relentless heat of south Florida and the low desert.

Deep summer water while fruit is filling, one light feed in spring, and a light thinning prune in late winter. Almost no pests, and the main failure mode is over-shearing or over-feeding.

Care is genuinely minimal. The one thing that matters is summer water: fruit takes four and a half to seven months from bloom, straight through the hot months, and irregular moisture during that stretch causes small fruit and heavy premature drop. An established plant survives drought easily — it just does not fruit well through one. Deep watering every week or so through summer, with a good mulch ring, is the whole irrigation programme.

Feed lightly, once, in early spring, or simply topdress with compost. Heavy nitrogen is counterproductive: it grows a lush plant with fewer flowers, which is the second most common reason a pineapple guava does not fruit. Prune lightly in late winter, taking out crossing and inward branches and opening the centre so light reaches the fruiting wood, or clip once right after harvest if you are keeping it hedge-like. Avoid repeated shearing through spring and summer, which removes the very growth that would have flowered.

Pest and disease pressure is remarkably low — this is one of the cleanest edible plants you can grow. Scale insects build up in the shaded interior of an unpruned shrub, and root rot follows wet feet or mulch piled against the trunk. In Florida and the Gulf, Caribbean fruit fly will sting softening fruit, which is a good reason to collect windfalls daily. And because it is a Myrtaceae, it is a host for myrtle rust, now established in Florida, Hawaii and parts of California — worth knowing about, and worth reporting to your state agriculture office if you see it somewhere it is not yet established.

There is no picking judgement: ripe fruit falls. Shake the branches every couple of days, gather the drops, and rest them indoors a day or two before eating.

Feijoas are ripened by the plant and released by the plant. They do not change colour meaningfully, they do not soften noticeably on the branch, and fruit that has to be tugged off is not ready and will never develop proper flavour. The method is simply to shake the branches firmly every day or two through the season and collect whatever comes down — anything that drops from a shake is ripe or within a day of it. Mow or mulch under the bush before the season so windfalls are easy to see.

Spread the drops in a single layer somewhere cool for a day or two. That short rest is when a just-fallen feijoa comes into its own: the jelly around the seeds turns from cloudy to clear, the perfume rises, and the flavour rounds out. After that, refrigerate. Fruit left lying on the ground for several days does the opposite — it ferments, and the flesh goes brown, soft and boozy.

To eat one, cut it in half across the middle and scoop the flesh out with a teaspoon, which is how it is eaten everywhere it is grown. The translucent jelly around the seeds is the best part; the grainier white flesh nearer the skin is milder; the skin itself is bitter and usually discarded, though it goes into chutney. A mature shrub in a good year drops fruit steadily for six to ten weeks, which is far more than a household eats fresh — plan for the freezer and the jam pan.

A few days on the counter to peak, a week or two refrigerated, and the scooped pulp freezes very well. A glut becomes chutney, jam, cordial and cake.

Feijoas are not long keepers, but they are more forgiving than they look. A couple of days at room temperature brings a fresh windfall to its best. After that, refrigerate them — whole fruit holds in good condition for roughly one to two weeks in the crisper, longer for firm cultivars like Triumph that were bred partly for keeping. Store them dry and loose; sealed in a bag they sweat and go brown at the blossom end.

The best way to bank a glut is to scoop and freeze the pulp. Halve the fruit, spoon out the flesh, and freeze it in measured portions or in ice-cube trays. It discolours a little on thawing — a squeeze of lemon or lime juice mixed in before freezing keeps it bright — and it comes out perfectly good for smoothies, cakes, sorbet and chutney through the winter. Whole feijoas do not freeze well.

Beyond freezing, the classic uses are chutney (the traditional partner for the fruit's acidity, and the one place the bitter skin earns a role), jam and jelly, cordial and syrup, and dried slices. New Zealand, where the fruit is a national obsession, turns the annual glut into everything from feijoa vodka to feijoa crumble. If you have more than you can process, feijoas keep giving as a fresh crop for weeks — the fruit is worth giving away, and neighbours who have never had one rarely forget it.

Scoop it with a teaspoon; that is the classic. Beyond that, chutney, jam, cakes and smoothies - plus the sweet flower petals, which are a genuinely useful edible flower.

The standard way to eat a feijoa is to halve it and eat it out of the shell with a teaspoon, and it is hard to improve on. The flavour is unusual and hard to describe — pineapple, guava, quince, strawberry and a cool minty note all at once — with a bright acidity that keeps it from being cloying. Cut it right before you eat it, since the flesh browns quickly in air.

In the kitchen it behaves like a soft, acidic fruit. It goes into cakes, muffins, crumbles and loaves (feijoa cake is a fixture in New Zealand kitchens), blends into smoothies with banana and yoghurt, cooks down into jam and jelly, and makes a superb chutney with ginger, onion and vinegar — the one preparation that uses the bitter skin to advantage. It also makes excellent cordial and, traditionally, country wine and liqueur. Pair it with lime, ginger, vanilla, coconut and apple.

Do not overlook the flowers. The thick petals are sweet, mildly cinnamon-flavoured, and pleasantly chewy — scattered over a fruit salad, frozen into ice cubes, folded into whipped cream, or simply eaten off the bush while you garden. Because pollination happens at the centre of the flower, taking a few petals from each bloom costs you no fruit at all. Very few plants give you a genuinely worthwhile edible flower and a genuinely worthwhile fruit from the same bloom.

A cool-highland plant, not a tropical one. Best in zones 8-10 with cool nights - California, the Pacific Northwest and the upper South. It needs a little winter chill and sulks in relentless tropical heat.

The counter-intuitive fact about pineapple guava is that it is a cool-climate subtropical. It comes from highland southern Brazil and Uruguay, it wants a modest amount of winter chill (roughly 50 to 100 hours below 45°F), and it fruits best where summer nights are cool. That makes its ideal range coastal and inland California, the Pacific Northwest, and the upper South — not the tropics.

Zones 9 and 10: the sweet spot. Reliable annual crops, evergreen year-round, and an excellent hedge or specimen. Zone 8: fully workable — established plants shrug off 12 to 15°F — but give a young plant a sheltered site, deep mulch and frost cloth for its first two or three winters, and expect an occasional hard winter to burn foliage that then regrows. Zone 7b: the true edge, and a gamble; a south wall, a warm microclimate and acceptance that some winters will cut it back are the price of entry.

Zone 11 and the hot lowland tropics: this is where people are surprised. Pineapple guava grows in south Florida and similar climates but flowers and fruits poorly, because it does not get the chill or the cool nights it wants. The low desert is hard on it for the same reason from the other direction — it takes heat far better with adequate water, but relentless heat plus dry air plus no chill gives you a shrub rather than a crop. If you are in a genuinely tropical climate and want this flavour, a true guava (Psidium) is the plant that actually suits you.

No fruit is almost always shearing, over-feeding, or a cultivar with no pollen partner. Small fruit and heavy drop is summer drought. Fruit that never softens on the branch is normal - it ripens by falling.

Beautiful plant, no fruit: work through three causes in order. First, shearing — flowers form on the current season's growth, so a hedge trimmed two or three times a year removes its own crop; clip only once, right after harvest. Second, pollination — many cultivars need a second, different cultivar within about twenty feet, so a lone Mammoth or Triumph will bloom magnificently and set almost nothing. Third, nitrogen — a plant fed like a hedge grows leaves instead of flowers. Add a fourth for the hot South: too little winter chill and too-warm nights.

Flowers, then nothing: usually the pollination problem above, sometimes a hot dry spell during bloom. Small fruit, or lots of little fruit dropping in midsummer: water stress during the long fruit-fill period — deep, regular summer watering is the fix, and mulch holds it. Fruit that never seems to ripen on the bush: it will not. Feijoas ripen and fall; shake the branches and collect the drops.

Windfalls brown, soft and smelling of alcohol inside: they sat on the ground too long and fermented — collect daily and rest them indoors instead. Maggots in the fruit in Florida or the Gulf: Caribbean fruit fly; pick up every windfall promptly and destroy infested fruit rather than composting it. Sticky leaves, black sooty film, ants on the stems: scale insects in the shaded interior — open the plant up with a thinning prune and treat with horticultural oil. Bright yellow-orange powdery pustules on new growth: myrtle rust, a serious disease of the myrtle family — do not move cuttings or plants, and contact your state agriculture office.

Seed is easy but does not come true and is slow to bear. Cuttings are notoriously stubborn; layering is the reliable home method, and grafted named cultivars are what you buy.

Seed is the easy route and the least useful one. Rinse the tiny seeds out of ripe pulp, dry them briefly, and sow shallowly in a warm mix; germination is reliable within a few weeks. The catch is that seedlings do not come true — fruit quality is a lottery, plants often take four to six years or more to bear, and some seedlings are effectively self-sterile. Seedlings are excellent as a hedge, as rootstock, or as pollen partners; they are a poor way to get good fruit.

Cuttings are how the named cultivars are reproduced, and they have a reputation for being difficult — slow, low-percentage, and demanding. If you want to try, take semi-hardwood cuttings of the current season's growth in late summer, wound the base, use a strong rooting hormone, and keep them under mist or a humidity tent with bottom heat. Expect months and a modest success rate.

Layering is the reliable home method. Peg a low branch down into the soil in spring, wound the underside where it touches, cover it, keep it damp, and sever it the following year once it has rooted — you get a plant identical to the parent with no equipment at all. Air-layering works too. For most gardeners, though, the sensible answer is to buy grafted or cutting-grown named cultivars: you get known fruit quality, known pollination behaviour, and fruit in two to four years instead of five or six.

High in vitamin C and fibre for its size, low in calories, and a good source of folate and potassium - with genuinely useful amounts of dietary iodine, which is unusual in fruit.

Feijoas are a nutritionally solid fruit: notably high in vitamin C (a couple of fruits covers a meaningful share of a day's intake), good dietary fibre for their size, useful folate and potassium, and a spread of polyphenol antioxidants concentrated in the flesh and especially the skin. All of that comes in a low-calorie package with a lot of flavour, which is a good combination.

The unusual entry on the list is iodine. Feijoas accumulate more iodine than almost any other fruit — a genuine nutritional curiosity rather than a health claim, and one reason the fruit gets a certain amount of attention in New Zealand where it is eaten in quantity. The amount varies a lot with soil, so treat it as a pleasant bonus rather than a supplement.

The flower petals are simply sugar and a little fibre — a treat rather than a nutritional contribution. As with all fruit, the honest framing is that this is nourishing everyday food, not a remedy: eat feijoas because they are delicious and good for you in the ordinary way that fruit is.

Named for a Brazilian naturalist, collected in the 1800s, carried to France and then California by 1900 - and adopted so completely by New Zealand that most people assume it is a native there.

Acca sellowiana grows wild in the highlands of southern Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay and northern Argentina, where the fruit has been gathered for a very long time. It picked up its scientific and common names from two Europeans: João da Silva Feijó, a Brazilian naturalist, gave it feijoa, and the German collector Friedrich Sellow, who sent specimens back from Brazil, gave it sellowiana.

The plant reached Europe in the late 1800s through the French botanist Edouard André, who fruited it on the Riviera around 1890, and from there it moved quickly — to California by about 1900, where nurseryman Francesco Franceschi introduced it to Santa Barbara and where several of the standard cultivars, including Coolidge, were selected. It has been quietly planted as an ornamental hedge across the American South and West ever since, often by people who never learn it makes fruit.

The place it truly took root was New Zealand, which got it via Australia in the 1920s and adopted it so thoroughly that feijoa season is a national event, most of the best modern cultivars (Apollo, Unique, Triumph, Mammoth, Gemini) are New Zealand selections, and countless New Zealanders assume the plant is native. That is the reason a Brazilian highland shrub is best known to English speakers by a Portuguese name, and why the cultivar list on this page reads like a tour of the North Island.