boomerblog

Growing Lychee trees at home can be a most rewarding hobby. Mainly, because you can eat the fruit of your labors. Lychees are a Chinese fruit that are fast catching favor with the mainstream. Taste a few fresh homegrown lychee and you’ll quickly understand why the fuss over this fickle fruit. The exterior is rough and bright red or greenish pink and is heart shaped. But the rough outer layer guards a soft luscious juicy white interior that has a unique sweet exotic taste.

This year I was lucky as we had a great crop on our 10-year-old Brewster tree pictured above. This tree just sat there for ten long years and suddenly is full of bright red lychee.

Lychee trees come in many varieties and can be grown in most climates where the winters are above 28 degrees on the coldest nights. But they are a slow-growing tree and may require ten years or more before they blossom. Then the blossoms often require water to pollinate. I’ve found that sprinkling the flower-laden blossoms with a hose helps to simulate rain and raise the humidity enough for them to pollinate. I’ve heard that during droughts in Asian countries, the fruit won’t set. By using a sprinkler or hose, you can fake out the blossoms to set.

Variety of Lychees:
Brewster: A great taste but giant seed. It is bright red, juicy and large.
Mauritius: A steady producer, flavor is not quite as good as Brewster in blind taste tests but has many fruits with a smaller seed.
Hak Yip: Slow grower that does well in containers for those with cold winters.
Bengal: Rose flavored and slender.
Kwai Mi: Like Mauritius with a pink fruit and a small seed.

I’ve only grown the Brewster and Kwai Mi. But if I can grow them in the thick adobe soils of Southern California, anyone with average soil should have better results. You may not want to try it in the North East unless you plant in containers and bring them in for the winter.

Here are some other websites that offer information on lychee:
http://www.lycheesonline.com/index.cfm
http://www.tropicalfruitnursery.com/lychee/index.htm

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 6th, 2005 at 7:15 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.