However, it takes an incredibly long time for this plant to grow.
My mom recently sent me some photos of Gurmichama from the Great South Florida Food Forest Project.
In the second edition of Create Your Own Florida Food Forest , I wrote:
We planted gurmichama trees in the Great South Florida Food Forest Project about eight years ago, and they’re only about two feet tall now.
Morton writes, “The gurmichama grows slowly when young unless it is grown in a mixture of peat moss and sand, with a thick layer of peat moss around the roots at planting and liberally fertilized. In Hawaii it took seven years to reach seven feet. It begins to bear fruit when the plant is four or five years old.”
Probably so, but oh my goodness, it’s a dog. Having read about its delicious berries and beautiful appearance, I enthusiastically planted one, but it has since been neglected.
For many years.
I’m sure it hates the nasty sand, but I’ve been mulching and fertilizing it occasionally, if not regularly. It’s not growing very much yet, far behind the others. It’s flowered this year but produced no fruit. What a wonderful tree. So wonderful.
If you decide to grow Gurmichama, you may have better luck: if you can find a fresh seed, it will grow from there and is sure to bear fruit within 300 years of germination.
Here’s what the tree looked like when planted in 2015:
Now, nine years later, it looks better.
Well, at least they’re alive! That doesn’t seem to be the case for the cashews, navel oranges, key lime quats, cinnamon, cacao and jackfruit we planted.
Essentially, my field report on growing Gurmichama is as follows:
Gurmichama: They take a long time to grow, but they’re also good at not dying.
He really was given very little care, poor thing.
Maybe we’ll start picking fruit now.
