I am now following Florida Fruit Geek, an American blog ‘celebrating the abundance, diversity, and health benefits of food that grows on trees’ in warmer climates.

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It is great to know about other websites that explore and communicate the potential of local fruit. Florida Fruit Geek (https://floridafruitgeek.com) is one which I discovered two weeks ago, when its author started to follow Les Jardins d’ici.

The same vision

Craig Hepworth and I share the same vision. ‘By planting a variety of fruit trees around us, it’s possible to enable diverse local production of delicious, health-enhancing feed’; ‘and since crops aren’t much good if people don’t know how to use them, I try to include basic recipes and processing techniques…’, he writes in his 600 word manifesto¹.

Tropical fruit

Florida Fruit Geek complements Les Jardins d’ici with information on tropical fruit, which grows in climates where ‘production can go on year round, with each season marked by different fruits and nuts ripening’.

I look forward to learning from similarities and differences between the fruit that grows in those conditions and our temperate climate fruit such as apples, pears and cherries.

Carambolas (starfruit) in the Florida Fruit Geek blog author’s greenhouse in North Florida. Photo Craig Hepworth, with his kind permission.

I am also interested in the horticultural methods and fruit processing, eating and sharing habits developed in tropical countries. They can provide us with useful insights for our own practice.

For instance Craig’s 15 March 2018 post ‘I named this carambola variety Anna’² is a great example of the importance of observation, curiosity and a taste for experimentation in the discovery and propagation of interesting cultivars.

‘Anna carambolas clearly had better flavour’². Photo Craig Hepworth.

In ‘How to start fruit trees from seeds’³, I found the contamination of good papaya varieties by South Florida’s ‘monkey vomit’ papayas genes a striking illustration of the potential power of cross-pollination.
It reminds us that seed planting shouldn’t be neglected as an effective method for discovering and selecting new varieties. Cross-pollination with surrounding trees which have fought for survival for generations can also result in delicious new varieties which thrive in their local biotope.

As for the dissertation on the common origins of the fruits pictured below and the conclusion that the red finger-sop might have been part of the dinosaurs’ diet⁴, I find the question well researched and the article fun to read.

Paw paw and finger-sop. Photo Craig Hepworth.

Finally, to conclude with this first sample of Florida Fruit Geek blog content, the Tempa Bay Monthly Fruitluck⁵ article tells me that we could organise more frequent events in Europe than our annual apple days. For instance the diversity of pear cultivars available would enable us to provide ripe long-keeping pears for monthly tasting and sharing events all the way through winter.

‘The Tampa Bay Fruitluck is a fun, community-building event’. Photo Craig Hepworth.

Connections

Like Craig, I look forward to ‘experimenting with how independent websites can interact with each other’. I hope we will find many blogs like ours around the planet, which contribute in their own ways to ‘make the world a more fruitful place’.

To that end, I have just created a ‘Connections’ category in Les Jardins d’ici, which this article is the first to populate. I hope there will be many more, and look forward to Florida Fruit Geek next publications.

1. https://floridafruitgeek.com/the-vision/ (accessed 18 March 2018)
2. https://floridafruitgeek.com/2018/03/15/i-named-this-carambola-variety-anna/ (accessed 18 March 2018)
3. https://floridafruitgeek.com/how-to-start-fruit-trees-from-seed/ (accessed 18 March 2018)
4. https://floridafruitgeek.com/2017/11/12/i-got-to-taste-a-kind-of-fruit-that-dinosaurs-ate/ (accessed 18 March 2018)
5. https://floridafruitgeek.com/2018/02/25/the-tampa-bay-monthly-fruitluck/ (accessed 18 March 2018)