gabiroba

Photo: joao batista Shimoto — CC BY-SA 3.0 · source

Survives zone 8 through 9

Harvest calendar

Best planted in early spring after your last frost, or in fall before the ground freezes, depending on your climate.

Small yellow-green aromatic fruit — sweet-tart with a resinous guava note; eaten fresh and made into liqueur in Brazil. Care: Winter protection — mulch, fleece, or a warm wall.

Hardiness

Zone 8–9

Habit

Shrub

Edible part

Fruit

Ripens

Summer

Mature size

Compact shrub 1–3 m; containerable

Light

Full sun

Soil pH

5.5–7.0 (acid–neutral; dislikes chalk)

Environment

Cerrado (seasonally dry savanna)

Native range

Cerrado of central-western and south-eastern Brazil (Mato Grosso do Sul, Goiás, Minas Gerais, São Paulo, Paraná)

Status

Both wild and cultivated

Years to fruit

3–4 yrs

Growth speed

Slow

Spacing

150 cm (59 in) apart — about 2.3 m² (24 sq ft) per plant

Leaf shape

Opposite, simple, elliptic to obovate with a pointed tip, 4–8 cm long, gland-dotted and aromatic; new growth softly hairy.

Root system

Deep cerrado root system with a woody underground xylopodium at the base — a storage organ that lets the plant resprout after fire or drought, and the reason established plants tolerate a long dry season but resent transplanting.

Fruit description

Small rounded berry about 1.5–2.5 cm across, green ripening to yellow-green, with juicy aromatic pulp holding roughly 5–7 seeds. Sweet-tart with a resinous guava note, eaten fresh and made into juice, liqueur and ice cream in Brazil.

Propagation

Seed is the usual route: ferment the pulp for a day, wash, dry briefly and sow — seed is short-lived and should not be stored. Cuttings root very poorly across the genus.

Pollination

Self-incompatible — needs a second, genetically distinct plant. A floral-biology study in Mato Grosso do Sul put its self-incompatibility index at 0.22, with 75% of hand-selfed flowers aborted by day six and apomixis failing outright; honeybees and native Xylocopa and Exomalopsis do the pollen transfer. One plant on its own will flower and set almost nothing.

The edible parts listed above are a starting point, not a field guide. Identify a plant with certainty — ideally against a local authority — before eating any part of it, and read the full disclaimer. Spotted something wrong? Report it.