Mexican hawthorn (tejocote)

Photo: Daniel Manrique (roadmr@entropia.com.mx) — CC BY-SA 3.0 · source

Survives zone 6 through 9

Harvest calendar

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

Grown far more for cooking than fresh eating in most Western gardens, but in its home range the ripe fruit is also eaten out of hand — firm, aromatic and tart-sweet, closer to a small crabapple than a typical fresh-eating fruit. Its real importance is culinary: it is the defining fruit of ponche navideño and of candied Mexican dulces.

Hardiness

Zone 6–9

Habit

Tree

Edible part

Fruit

Ripens

Summer–autumn

Mature size

Small tree 4–10 m with a broad crown

Light

Full sun

Soil pH

6.0–7.0 (near-neutral)

Environment

Montane

Native range

Mountain highlands of central and southern Mexico and Guatemala — dry to seasonally moist upland forest and scrub around 1,900–2,600 m — with long-established introductions in the Andes of South America.

Status

Both wild and cultivated

Years to fruit

2–4 yrs

Growth speed

Slow to medium — seedling trees commonly take 5–8 years to begin bearing, though grafted trees can flower heavily by their third year.

Spacing

600 cm (236 in) apart — about 36 m² (388 sq ft) per plant

Leaf shape

Semi-evergreen in mild climates, oval to diamond-shaped, 4–8 cm long, with serrated margins and only shallow lobing compared with some other hawthorns.

Root system

Not well documented in the literature reviewed; presumed to follow the typical Crataegus pattern of a branching heart-root system rather than a deep taproot.

Fruit description

A globose to oblong pome about 1.5–2.5 cm across, yellow, gold, copper-orange or orange-red at maturity, containing three to five hard brown seeds. Flesh is firm, aromatic and pleasantly tart-sweet, texturally between a crabapple and a dense pear. Ripens from around October into January and is eaten both fresh and, more commonly, cooked — stewed in ponche, candied into dulces, or made into rielitos.

Propagation

Seed is the traditional route for rootstocks but is notoriously slow and erratic — the hard stone and dormant embryo typically need about three months of warm stratification (around 15°C) followed by three months of cold stratification (around 4°C), and germination can still take up to 18 months or more even then. Sowing freshly harvested, still-green seed (embryo developed but coat not yet hardened) directly into a cold frame can sometimes trigger germination the following spring. Named or larger-fruited selections are grafted onto seedling tejocote rootstock to fix fruit quality and shorten time to bearing.

Pollination

Self-fertile

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.