Jambu Tree

When I moved in to my current house back in July 2012, I designed 4 planter boxes from concrete with 2 planter boxes on each side of the car porch. The objective initially was to have some fruit trees that the family can enjoy.

That same year, I planted a small Jambu Tree also known as the water apple fruit tree. It spent the next 3 years growing and the first flowers emerged. But it did not yield much produce that year.

Over the years, learning to care for the tree and fruits has been a challenge. From trying to wrap the fruit to avoid fly larvae, wrapping the fruits too early and not letting it set properly resulting in the fruit dropping off, difficulty climbing up the tree to get the fruits wrapped, infestations by pests and red fire ants 🐜.

17 Jan 2014: slightly over 1 year since I planted the Jambu tree in the planter box
12 April 2015: first flowers emerged, but most fruits fell before fully maturing.
Managed to salvage a few fruits from this first flowering. Very happy with the taste. Sugar sweet with a crisp juicy texture.
Some light fruiting occurred again in September 2017 but soon after that the tree was badly attacked by bugs until June 2018. I had to do a major pruning and stripped the entire tree of its main branches and leaves. Fortunately, the tree manage to spring back to life really quickly.
But was again plagued with insects in 2019. Sadly, I had to do a second major pruning, stripping the whole tree of its leaves.

The planter box can be seen here.
Finally in February 2020 I decided to terminate the tree. The decision was heavy heartedly made as I had an injury that will not allow me to care for the tree. But with that decision, somehow in March 2020, it began flowering and fruiting with a huge harvest.
As always, there was always lost crops. I still need to find a way to reduce these losses. Bats and tree shrews were constantly attacking the fruits even those that were wrapped up. Fruit flies infested the fruits that were not being wrapped up.

All in all, it was worth it as the fruits that did make it were sugar sweet with a crisp juicy texture.
24 March 2020: following the last harvest, I decided to do a 70% pruning to better manage the runaway branches that overhung to my neighbour house. I also intend to control the height so that the tree will grow horizontally. My next mission is to gradually prune off branches that go upward and train the young shoots to grow horizontally and importantly, low.

Excess branches that were cut off will be used in the Hügelkultur project. The leaves will be used for compost for the rest of the veggie garden.

Managing New Growth

The next thing that needs to be done for the Jambu tree is to Make sure it does not grow out of hand again. Some trimming of the going shoots will be required as it can be seen here, up to 5 new branches can come out from one spot.
13 Apr 2020: New flowers emerging
13 Apr 2020: More Jambu flower buds are appearing across the tree. Note that the last harvest of this tree was on 24 Mar 2020 which was followed by a 70% pruning.