An enthusiastic young farmhand's outlandish leaf skirt has helps him gain exposure for a little-known fruit.
ABC Rural: Jennifer NicholsFormer Birdwood nursery owner and industry innovator and mentor, Peter Young, said the jaboticaba fruit's lack of shelf life, tendency to bruise during transport — and the fact that trees can take 8 to 15 years to mature — have meant it has not been widely commercialised.
"It's great to take along to farmer's markets for people to consume within one or two days but you've really got to have a product that could last 7 to 14 days to go through the marketing system and through distribution centres if you wanted to make it a mainstream fruit," Mr Young said. "It is fairly slow-growing but it's one of the prettiest trees you'll ever grow, it's got very fine leaves and makes a really lovely productive hedge."
Mr Young used to sell between 1,000-2,000 potted jaboticaba trees a year and believed they were coming back into fashion. "By seed it used to take us about three years to produce a tree that was 200 millimetres high and that's why to buy one, unless they're small, they're quite expensive."
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