loquat

Photo: Aftabbanoori — 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.

Loquat — juicy, sweet-tart orange flesh with a flavor somewhere between apricot and mild citrus, eaten fresh out of hand or cooked into jam and pies; one of the earliest tree fruits to ripen each year. Care: Winter protection — mulch, fleece, or a warm wall.

Hardiness

Zone 8–9

Habit

Tree

Edible part

Fruit

Ripens

Apr–Jun — flowers in autumn and winter and ripens in spring, four to five months later, which is the reverse of almost every other fruit tree here

Mature size

Evergreen tree 5–10 m; containerable and often grown that way outside the subtropics

Light

Full sun to partial

Soil pH

6.0–7.0 (near-neutral)

Environment

Subtropical

Native range

South-central China (Hubei, Sichuan and neighbouring provinces), despite the epithet japonica — it was introduced to Japan over a thousand years ago and long assumed native there.

Status

Cultivated

Years to fruit

2–4 yrs

Growth speed

Moderate

Spacing

500 cm (197 in) apart — about 25 m² (269 sq ft) per plant

Leaf shape

Large, alternate, stiff and leathery, 12–30 cm long, deeply impressed veins giving a corrugated surface, coarsely toothed toward the tip, glossy dark green above and densely rusty-woolly beneath.

Root system

Fibrous and moderately shallow, spreading wider than the canopy; surface-rooting enough that it dislikes cultivation underneath and appreciates a mulch. Wind-firm once established but slow to re-anchor after transplanting.

Fruit description

Oval to pear-shaped pome 3–5 cm long in dense clusters, yellow to orange, sometimes red-blushed, with succulent white to orange flesh around two to four large glossy brown seeds. Sweet-tart and aromatic. The seeds and leaves contain cyanogenic compounds and should not be eaten.

Propagation

Seed germinates readily from fresh fruit but takes six to eight years to bear and does not come true. Named cultivars are grafted or shield-budded onto loquat seedlings, or onto quince where a smaller tree is wanted.

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.