Expand available fruit varieties in East Africa

[Martin_Tlustos]

Hello everyone,

right now, there aren’t too many different fruits available in East Africa (at least here in Tanzania). It’s mainly mango, avocado, citrus, papaya, jackfruit, bananas, guavas, cashew, anona spp and passion fruit. There are tons of other fruit out there that could be grown here as well, but you don’t get any. If you have any kind of fruit tree/shrub that you think is not easily available elsewhere in East Africa, please share! Thank you very much in advance!

Some ideas about what other fruit would be nice:
different kinds of sapote
miracle fruit
different kinds of passion fruit
jaboticaba
inga
Acerola
Magosteen
Breadfruit
Shea
Litchi
Num num

etc…

[Bryan_Beachy]

Sounds like you have a decent selection already. Some good ones I don’t see would be, star fruit, Eugenias like uniflora, selloi, involucrata, or calycina. There’s many fruits that you can introduce but it’s hard to know which ones will be appreciated culturally. That’s why I’d recommend trying many and expecting about 25 percent of them to become adaptable and appreciated.

Some others: Canistel, loquat, abiu, cempedak, durian, langsat, mamey sapote.

There’s also many annonas you might be able to introduce like ilama, rollinia, or atamoya.

If you wanna grow mangosteens I’d recommend growing species like G. intermedia, G. brasiliensis, G. aristata, G. livingstonii. You can also try Garcinia mangostana but it is much harder to grow than these others. You’ll need acidic soil with high fertility and organic matter and high humidity / low temperatures to grow G.mangostana.