Naranjilla Story

The Naranjilla, a new adventure, was grown from seed in Spring 2008. Once it was large enough, the plant was planted into a GS300 in the polytunnel.

	February 2009 At the end of the year we moved the naranjilla into the greenhouse where it has happily grown since.
	July 2009 This month, it has grown so much that we had to attach an auto top-up tank to it and increase the floods to 1 per hour for 8 hours of the day. This has resulted in a bumper crop and a strong, healthy plant.
	September 2009 The naranjilla has grown huge over the past few months. The fruit are beginning to ripen.
	November 2009 Harvest Time!
	Having set the date a couple of weeks ago the greenhouse team were very excited to try the Naranjilla fruit.
	On Thursday morning John, Paul and I gathered in the greenhouse for the grand tasting. The fruit are exceptionally juicy and the tasting proved to quite a messy occasion. Having counted the fruit on the plant I can safely say that there is in excess of 100 fruit, many of which are yet to ripen so we have plenty to look forward to. The flavour could be described as akin to kiwi with a tangy lime undertone.
	Later John took a batch of naranjilla fruit and made some jam. From 1500g of fruit he obtained 750g of fruit pulp to which he added 750g of sugar.