2024 Author: Gavin MacAdam | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:38
Pigeon plum (Latin Coccoloba diversifolia) - a fruit crop belonging to the Buckwheat family.
Description
Young pigeon plum trees are endowed with spreading and dense crowns, and in middle-aged trees, the crowns become vertical. This feature allows these trees to easily endure hurricanes, typhoons and tropical showers, which, in principle, are far from uncommon in the homeland of the pigeon plum. And this property also makes it possible to use these trees in windproof plantations.
The height of mature trees can reach eighteen meters, but their average height is about ten meters. And the oval-oblong leathery leaves of a pigeon plum grow from one to seven centimeters wide and from three to thirteen centimeters long. As for the flowers, they are very small and completely inconspicuous in this culture (greenish-white sepals are equipped with small creamy-whitish petals), and they appear with the onset of spring.
Pigeon plum fruits ripening in autumn look like dark purple berries, the diameter of which is very small and ranges from six to ten millimeters. They boast a very pleasant sour-sweet taste and knit quite a bit.
Where grows
The homeland of the pigeon plum is the coastal regions of the Caribbean (South Florida, South Mexico and Guatemala, as well as Belize and the Bahamas).
Application
The fruits of the pigeon plum are eaten fresh or they make excellent jam and make fruit drinks or jam. In addition, juice is squeezed out of them and these wonderful berries are fermented into wine.
The pigeons just love to feast on the berries of this plant - that is why it received such an interesting name. And some other birds are also not averse to eating them. And these trees are called plum not at all because of the relationship with the ordinary plum, but because of the similarity of the color of the fruits and their shape (even though the pigeon plum has much less fruit).
Pigeon plum plantings perfectly tolerate the polluted air of large cities and are magnificent hedges.
But as an agricultural crop, the pigeon plum has not found widespread use. However, the point here is not the lack of nutrients in the berries, but the economic inexpediency of growing this crop - when the trees reach a certain age, a significant part of the fruits begins to form exclusively on the uppermost branches, and it is extremely difficult to harvest from them. And people get very few fruits from the tops, since all ripe fruits are instantly eaten by all kinds of insects and birds. And people, as a rule, are content with fruits that have grown on the lower branches, which they manage to save from enterprising birds. Of course, these are only miserable crumbs of the total fruit volume.
Contraindications
There are no special contraindications to the use of pigeon plum at the moment, so if you want to enjoy juicy fruits, you should focus solely on individual intolerance.
Growing and caring
Pigeon plum is incredibly thermophilic - even with very insignificant frosts, it can die. But it is absolutely unpretentious to soils - this culture feels great on rocky and sandy soils, and even on sand. And it also easily tolerates numerous splashes from salt waves on the crown. Pigeon plum is intolerant only to the flooding of the roots with sea water.
It should be noted that this plant is very light-loving, and therefore it will grow well only in open areas.
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