Unusual Fruits Ripening

The last few weeks has seen some of my more unusual fruit ripen on our little homestead.

The first was the musk melon, although to be fair to it I think the vine died off before it had chance to ripen fully. As such it was a little tasteless, completely edible though and probably alright in a fruit salad. I will try to grow these again though, as I planted them pretty late so they didn't really have a fair shot at producing fruit with such a short season. 

Musk Melon

 The second was our little Cocktail Kiwi plant. This tastes amazing, just like normal kiwi fruits only with no fuzz so you just pop the grape sized fruit straight into your mouth. I recommend planting this to anyone reading this blog. The books say when it's mature it can produce a thousand fruits so great for preserving.

Cocktail kiwi

 Another new fruit (to me anyway) is the Chilean Guava. This is another great tasting berry. The only down side is the skin is a little tough, luckily the fruit is so nice tasting, like a spiced blueberry, that you don't notice the skin too much. I'm glad I've got six of these plants, they have put on no end of growth this year, so hopefully I'll have plenty of berries in the future.

Chilean Guava

Has anyone else grown or eaten any interesting fruit this year?

Cocktail Kiwi

I promise this is the last part of my order from Suttons (you can see what else I ordered here and here)! 

I've wanted to grow a kiwi fruit for a long time but I've never had anywhere to grow it against and my mothers kiwi has never fruited (or even flowered) so that has put me off as well.

As usual a well packaged plant and a good size as well

 Then I read on the internet about the "cocktail" kiwi (or kiwi fruit "Issai"), from Siberia, hardy down to minus 35 and a mature plant can produce over 1000 fruits in a year, they're the size of grapes, with no fur and dry to make kiwi sweets. Sounds like my kind of plant! I just needed somewhere to plant it.

Our "beautiful" shed that we inherited when we brought the place. Although it does face south west...

 I kept thinking about where I could grow a climber like this but struggled to find somewhere that wasn't on my plans to be knocked down or moved. I then decided to stop thinking so long term, sometimes you can be thinking too far into the future and not utilise what you've got now. The old tin sheds in our front yard are going to come down at some point, but not before I've built the extension and a barn, so that means they're going to be about for at least five years and they're blinking ugly as you drive up to our house!

Hopefully the kiwi will soon fill this trellis

 I found some old trellis up the field at my dads and wired it to the shed, dug a good sized hole and filled it with soil and compost before planting the kiwi and training it up the timbers.

Already some little fruits on it.

Kiwis grow quite fast so hopefully it will begin to cover this old shed and produce some fruit in the meantime, there's already some little fruits on the plant. I've got a little more trellis for the other side as well, so there I'm going to plant a clematis for a bit of colour.

Anyone else keep thinking long term and not using what they've got now because of it?

Also anyone else grow kiwis and have much success? Any tips?