Fruit Tree of the Day: Guava

Sorry about not posting yesterday, guys. I blame @ed for the day getting away from me.

Today’s fruit tree is the guava. Many of you may have this. The juice is very common in Hispanic stores, and I’m also finding the fruit at a lot of ethnic stores around Florida. I’m not sure how to describe the taste of them, but they are pretty good.

Like mangoes, there are hundreds of varieties of guava, even though you’ll only ever find one or two different kinds in a store. I haven’t sampled enough different varieties to know what my favorite kind is. The only bad thing about guavas is almost the whole edible pulp of most Mexican varieties is filled with seeds–and they aren’t like kiwis, where they’re soft and can be ignored. No, to eat it out of hand, you have to just not chew and just move it around in your mouth until it’s broken down enough. Luckily, they’re pretty soft, so you don’t really need to chew much. There is also a Thai guava that doesn’t have seeds throughout the whole thing (just the middle) but it doesn’t taste very good.

These grow very well in Florida–so well that in South Florida, they’re considered an invasive species. South Florida has a very alkaline soil, so on the small chance your tree has a hard time, usually adding lime to the soil will be enough to help it spring back. That happened to my guava tree.

This is a nice tree to plant because you’ll be able to get lots of maintenance-free fruit and get to sample varieties you won’t be able to find in the store.