These 3 Forgotten Home Garden Fruits Are Making A Comeback
From the tropical taste of pawpaw to the sweet once-forbidden nostalgia of red currants, these dessert plants are making a comeback!
Hello Gardenerds,
Welcome to the very first issue of the Let’s Nerd Out About Gardening newsletter. Yes, it’s a long title, but I think it accurately gets across what it’s about. This is a newsletter to celebrate the trivia, the tidbits, the minutiae that make gardening (and farming and nature) so amazing. It celebrates learning itself!
Who am I? I’m Tanith, a freelance gardening writer. Research is a big part of my job, and it’s the part I love the most. The articles I’m assigned take me deeper into things that I know a bit about, or introduce me to plants and ideas that I had no idea existed, like ground cherries or yarrow for lawns. And that’s what I want to share in this newsletter.
In that spirit, let’s talk about some unusual fruit and berry plants.
Something to learn…
This past September, I watched Get Growing (Series 1), a New Zealand TV show about a family starting a vegetable garden in their backyard with the guidance of an expert home gardener. (It’s amazing what DVDs you can find at the library.)
A lot of it was what you’d expect: four big square raised garden beds for annuals and another raised garden for herbs and pollinators.
But I really loved the idea for the final garden bed — a dessert garden.
A dessert garden is basically a perennial garden bed for berries and fruit trees. Once you’ve had your meal of freshly harvested vegetables, you top it off with a berry bowl.
Okay, it’s not technically revolutionary to include berry bushes in your garden, but I always saw it as something you put around your fence. And dessert garden just sounds more romantic than berry bush row.
Now, New Zealand has a much longer growing season than I do (I’m in Canadian Hardiness Zone 3B, or about USDA Zone 2, up in the Canadian prairies), so it’s easier to grow fruit. But just because you’re in the north, doesn’t mean you can’t have a dessert garden. And it’s not just limited to strawberries.
Now, there are a ton of shrubs we could talk about. But here’s 3 that I came across in my research that used to be staples here in North America, seemed to disappear, and are now making a resurgence.
Pawpaw (Asimina triloba)
But wait, you say. Isn’t pawpaw just another name for papaya? Yes and no. Yes, papaya (Carica papaya) is also commonly known as pawpaw. And no, the pawpaw I’m talking about is a different tree, Asimina triloba. And yes, this does make it very difficult to find an accurate photo to show you.
Pawpaw (Asimina triloba) is native to North America. It’s a tropical fruit that you can grow easily in temperate regions (USDA Zones 5 to 8). The fruit looks like a mango, but tastes either like a non-acidic pineapple or a pineapple-banana cross.
But if pawpaw is so delicious, why haven’t we heard of it? It ships poorly. When we commonly ate food grown within a few miles of us, pawpaw was a staple in the North American diet (where it grew well). But then we switched over to the global transportation model. Since pawpaw doesn’t ship well, grocery stores had no use for it.
The upside is that people are bringing it back. Farmers are growing small orchards to sell at their local Farmer’s Market. Home growers are adding it to their gardens, and it’s a good one to add if you’re trying to grow food that you can’t find for cheaper at the grocery store.
You do need to plant at least 2 pawpaw in order to cross-pollinate. Interestingly, they’re not pollinated by bees. They’re pollinated by flies. One expert suggests hanging road kill near your pawpaw trees to attract pollinators, but you could also just keep your compost bin nearby or pollinate by hand.
Interestingly, a high-quality pawpaw tree has a 50% chance of producing a seed for a high-quality (although varying in taste) pawpaw tree. This is a much better chance than with other fruit trees, especially apples. If you have the room and love to experiment, pawpaw offers a lot of opportunity.
(You can also find grafted seedlings of specific cultivars if you want to ensure that the tree you spent 3 to 7 years growing bears fruit you like eating.)
Ground Cherries (Physalis pruinosa)
The North American native Ground Cherries are another victim of the industrial farming model. Like pawpaw, they don’t ship well. They’re also difficult to harvest on mass because, as their namesake says, they fall to the ground when ripe. But they’re not cherries, or even related to cherries. They’re nightshades, more closely related to tomatoes and potatoes.
And like tomatoes, they’re toxic when not ripe. If you have a nightshade allergy, give them a miss altogether. If you’re not allergic, then always wait until the ground cherries drop to the ground (wrapped in their papery husk) before harvesting. Applying mulch (especially paper or landscape fabric) can help with harvesting.
But you don’t need to worry about them quickly rotting on the ground. If their papery husk remains intact, they stay fresh for 2 to 3 months in the fridge. Which is really good, because each plant can produce up to 100 ground cherries. With just a few plants, you’ll be well-supplied.
These are grown as an annual, so the USDA Zone doesn’t matter so much. However, they take a long time to grow (much like tomatoes), so start them 2 weeks before you’d start tomatoes, especially if you have a shorter growing season.
They’re also easily confused with Goldenberry (Physalis peruviana), Cossack Pineapples (Physalis pubescens), and Chinese Lantern (Physalis alkekengi). Partly because they look similar, and partly because most gardeners just don’t know enough about them to tell the difference.
Red Currants (Ribes rubrum)
I first tried red currants when I was sick while travelling in Freiburg, Germany. Lately, I’ve been craving them really badly, even though I can’t remember how they taste. Just look at them. Don’t they look so delicious???
(They are really good for you nutritionally.)
Unfortunately, while they’re very popular in Europe, they’ve all but disappeared in North America. While the other two disappeared because they couldn’t fit into the industrial farming model, this one disappeared because it was outlawed.
In the early 1900s, blister rust hit the US and began killing white pine trees. In those days, white pine logging was the backbone of the timber industry. Currants (especially black currants) are an intermediary host of white pine blister rust, so to protect the timber industry, Congress passed a law in 1911 that banned growing currants, even in home gardens.
When new disease-resistant varieties were developed, the federal ban was dropped. (Red currants were always less susceptible than black currants.) Pine tree logging just isn’t as much of a thing anymore. Some states have kept the bans.
After so long, we just forgot about currants. But there are people bringing them back, and you can find hardy shrubs for sale that will even survive my harsh winters.
Something to read…
What Is A Ground Cherry (from Julia Dimakos)
If you want to learn more about what a ground cherry is (and how it differs from the other 3 lookalikes), this article is fantastic. Julia Dimakos also has other articles on her experiences growing ground cherries and saving their seed.
A Once-Forbidden Fruit Makes A Resurgence (from Modern Farmer)
The story of how Greg Quinn worked to get the New York ban on currants lifted, and the challenges he faced as he tried to reintroduce black currants to Americans.
Plant of the Month: The Pawpaw (from JSTOR Daily)
If you’re interested in the historical use of pawpaw, JSTOR Daily has an interesting in-depth look. Where I kept seeing that pawpaw felt out of favor because of global shipping (even in university articles), it faced perception problems even before that.
Plastic Mulch Is Problematic — And Everywhere. Can We Do Better? (from Modern Farmer)
When I took a farming course, plastic mulch was something we struggled with. Plastic mulch has its upsides — it keeps down weeds, it’s relatively inexpensive, keeps soil moist for longer, and it warms up the soil. But we were learning to farm to save the environment, not add more plastic waste. Lena Beck from the Modern Farmer explores what solutions are being investigated for strawberries on a farming scale. There are a few interesting suggestions in the comments, like using waste wool.
Something to eat…
Cooking With Pawpaws (from the Kentucky State University extension office)
If you got your hands on pawpaw, what do you do with it? Well, you can eat it fresh, or you can try these recipes collected by Kentucky State University extension office.
Your turn:
What unusual dessert plant do you think should be more popular? What kind of sweet treats do you grow in your garden?
Reply in the comments to share. I’d love to know!
Happy gardening,
Tanith
P.S. Thanks for reading to the end. In these postscripts, I’ll be adding a dose of gardening humor. Prepare yourself, because I love puns.
This is a bit of an easy one, but Saskatoon berries. Growing up in Saskatchewan, it's a quintessential part of my childhood. We weren't gardeners back then, but we still had a bush growing in our backyard and I'd get a bowlful of berries around my birthday. It's also incredibly hardy, thriving even up in the north. It can handle our cold snaps.
I’ve always wondered what a paw paw was from the children’s song “Way down yonder in the paw paw patch”. Now I have a better idea but would stil like to taste one.