Borojoa, Anyone growing it?

[Soren]

Wait a minute Soren, before I read your post here, I had assumed that I was the very first person on the planet to cultivate a plantation of Amazonian Borojo in Africa, only to find out that you are way ahead of me.  I need a moment to absorb this news from Uganda.

I suppose this means I will now have to look elsewhere for that 15 minutes of fleeting fame promised me by Andy Warhol.   On a serious note it is great news to see that this botanical treasure has started to gain the recognition it deserves in tropical Africa, where animal and fish protein are comparatively expensive.

A few minutes before I sat down to write this response, a group of local hunters spent the afternoon chasing down rodents and small antelope with dogs, harvesting those meager sources of protein with very loud muzzle-loaders.  Meat is a highly prized commodity in this part of the African continent, as evidenced by the vast amount of energy devoted to acquiring small game animals to eat, and Borojo has the potential to make a MASSIVE difference in this regard, by making a vegetarian diet both feasible and healthy for rich and poor alike.

A tree like Borojo, if cultivated on a large scale in tropical Africa and Asia, would gain recognition as a long-overdue alternate source for all the protein that meat or poultry contain, along with a myriad of other nutritional benefits not found in beef, fish or chicken.  The fact that Borojo grows best under a shady canopy means that existing tree plantations can serve double utility with Borojo planted as an under-story to the older plantation tree canopy.

It is great to hear from you Soren, and please do post some pictures of the Borojo trees you are cultivating in Uganda, particularly if any of them happen to be in flower, or bearing fruit.  I am also curious to know whether or not the Borojo fruit finds a ready market in Uganda, if per chance you sell the harvest locally.   

Warmest regards from muttley

Thanks for the update - and nice to hear from a fellow African fruit grower, though I don't have any visions about Borojo, as I am just a collector ;-) Never the less, I will try and find the time to post some photos and hope to hear more from the Western side of the continent.!

[muttley]

Well, it is starting to look as though my jubilation about the success of my Borojoa plantation was premature.  I have found that ALL the Borojoa trees that have begun to flower are MALES, with not one single female flowering tree in sight.   

A total of ten trees have produced male flowers thus far, so my initial joy at seeing Borojoa flowering, a full 5 years earlier that they flower in their Amazon native habitat, has been dampened to say the least.  IF females Borojoa trees do make an appearance as time goes on, they will most likely do so in very small numbers, possibly as low as  one solitary female tree for every 20 or so males.

Fortunately Borojoa trees can grow from cuttings taken from woody stem sections, so any female trees that I do identify will become the parent stock for cuttings that I will then use to create more female trees, and that process of taking large numbers of cuttings from any female trees that I do identify will certainly delay fruiting for a couple of years.

Soren I would be grateful for any information you can provide about your own experience planting Borojo, specifically with respect to the ratio of male to female trees that you have recorded in your orchard.  As long as I can eventually find a few female Borojo trees,  I will be able to multiply them with cuttings, so my hope is that I will hear from you that you did get a few female trees over there in Uganda, where the climate and daylight hours are identical to mine in this part of West Africa.

[nullzero]

Well, it is starting to look as though my jubilation about the success of my Borojoa plantation was premature.  I have found that ALL the Borojoa trees that have begun to flower are MALES, with not one single female flowering tree in sight.   

A total of ten trees have produced male flowers thus far, so my initial joy at seeing Borojoa flowering, a full 5 years earlier that they flower in their Amazon native habitat, has been dampened to say the least.  IF females Borojoa trees do make an appearance as time goes on, they will most likely do so in very small numbers, possibly as low as  one solitary female tree for every 20 or so males.

Fortunately Borojoa trees can grow from cuttings taken from woody stem sections, so any female trees that I do identify will become the parent stock for cuttings that I will then use to create more female trees, and that process of taking large numbers of cuttings from any female trees that I do identify will certainly delay fruiting for a couple of years.

Soren I would be grateful for any information you can provide about your own experience planting Borojo, specifically with respect to the ratio of male to female trees that you have recorded in your orchard.  As long as I can eventually find a few female Borojo trees,  I will be able to multiply them with cuttings, so my hope is that I will hear from you that you did get a few female trees over there in Uganda, where the climate and daylight hours are identical to mine in this part of West Africa.

Why not just topwork the Male Borojoas?

[muttley]

I am not familiar with the term "topwork", Nullzero.  Would that be a reference to some manner of grafting of a female branch onto a male tree ?

I have to confess that my knowledge of these techniques is limited, so I would be very grateful for any advice that you can offer in this regard.

Much thanks in advance.

[RICBITAR]

Whats the uses of Borojo? thanks

[nullzero]

I am not familiar with the term "topwork", Nullzero.  Would that be a reference to some manner of grafting of a female branch onto a male tree ?

I have to confess that my knowledge of these techniques is limited, so I would be very grateful for any advice that you can offer in this regard.

Much thanks in advance.

Would be grafting branches on the dominate main branches of the tree. I am no master grafter, so its best to ask someone who has successfully grafted guava type plants. Others on this forum can recommend good grafting advice.

[muttley]

Much thanks for the quick reply, Nullzero.  I spent the past couple of minutes looking at Youtube videos on this subject.   Hopefully I will soon identify a female Borojo plant with which I can attempt this procedure, after a lot more reading that is.

[Soren]

I honestly have not checked the sex ratio - did you check the flowers to draw the conclusion on the biased sex-ratio?

[fruitlovers]

Well, it is starting to look as though my jubilation about the success of my Borojoa plantation was premature.  I have found that ALL the Borojoa trees that have begun to flower are MALES, with not one single female flowering tree in sight.   

A total of ten trees have produced male flowers thus far, so my initial joy at seeing Borojoa flowering, a full 5 years earlier that they flower in their Amazon native habitat, has been dampened to say the least.  IF females Borojoa trees do make an appearance as time goes on, they will most likely do so in very small numbers, possibly as low as  one solitary female tree for every 20 or so males.

Fortunately Borojoa trees can grow from cuttings taken from woody stem sections, so any female trees that I do identify will become the parent stock for cuttings that I will then use to create more female trees, and that process of taking large numbers of cuttings from any female trees that I do identify will certainly delay fruiting for a couple of years.

Soren I would be grateful for any information you can provide about your own experience planting Borojo, specifically with respect to the ratio of male to female trees that you have recorded in your orchard.  As long as I can eventually find a few female Borojo trees,  I will be able to multiply them with cuttings, so my hope is that I will hear from you that you did get a few female trees over there in Uganda, where the climate and daylight hours are identical to mine in this part of West Africa.

1 tree in 20 female? That would be extremely unusual. Maybe you are jumping too fast to wrong conclusion? But you didn't say how many trees in total you have? It happens in many species that the males flower first. Female trees flower later so that they will be more likely to be pollinated. For example, this is the norm with imbe (Garcinia livingstoneii), all the male trees will produce flowers first.

[muttley]

Hello Oscar.  Down in the farm beside the river I have planted several hundred Borojoa, but it is the twenty odd trees outside my house that have matured faster than the rest.  My estimate of possibly up to 20 males to one female was a projection based on my finding that all ten trees that have gone to flower have been male, with not one single female tree identifiable among the less mature plants so far.

The Borojo trees around my home that are currently flowering all stand about 7 feet tall, while those yet to flower range in height from 2 to 5 feet tall.   Down in the farm, where I  planted under too dense of a shade cover, the Borojo trees have grown far slower than the few I planted at the same time in my garden at home, and they range from 1 to 3 feet in height.

Now I have a  question that I hope you might be able to answer, Oscar, and that is whether it is in fact possible to use the top-work grafting method with a male tree serving as the root stock, but with scion branches taken from a female Borojo tree, all in the hopes of in effect changing the very gender of the tree from male to female. 

I hope this isn't too dumb of a question, but my internet and Youtube research on this subject found frequent reference to the use of top-working as a means of altering the variety of fruit produced by a tree, for example, but so far I have not found any mention of whether the gender of a tree can be changed with this procedure.  If this can be carried out with any degree of success, then I will be able to retain the large number of male trees on the farm and around the house, by simply using most of them as root-stock for top-work grafted female scion branches, if and when I have sufficient numbers of female trees to act as scion wood donors.

Any thoughts you may have on my noob question would be much appreciated.  By the way the Longans I bought from you as seed a couple of years back are now standing over ten feet tall and in robust health out here near the Equator.

Aloha.  Standing by for any pointers you can offer.

[fruitlovers]

Hello Oscar.  Down in the farm beside the river I have planted several hundred Borojoa, but it is the twenty odd trees outside my house that have matured faster than the rest.  My estimate of possibly up to 20 males to one female was a projection based on my finding that all ten trees that have gone to flower have been male, with not one single female tree identifiable among the less mature plants so far.

The Borojo trees around my home that are currently flowering all stand about 7 feet tall, while those yet to flower range in height from 2 to 5 feet tall.   Down in the farm, where I  planted under too dense of a shade cover, the Borojo trees have grown far slower than the few I planted at the same time in my garden at home, and they range from 1 to 3 feet in height.

Now I have a  question that I hope you might be able to answer, Oscar, and that is whether it is in fact possible to use the top-work grafting method with a male tree serving as the root stock, but with scion branches taken from a female Borojo tree, all in the hopes of in effect changing the very gender of the tree from male to female. 

I hope this isn't too dumb of a question, but my internet and Youtube research on this subject found frequent reference to the use of top-working as a means of altering the variety of fruit produced by a tree, for example, but so far I have not found any mention of whether the gender of a tree can be changed with this procedure.  If this can be carried out with any degree of success, then I will be able to retain the large number of male trees on the farm and around the house, by simply using most of them as root-stock for top-work grafted female scion branches, if and when I have sufficient numbers of female trees to act as scion wood donors.

Any thoughts you may have on my noob question would be much appreciated.  By the way the Longans I bought from you as seed a couple of years back are now standing over ten feet tall and in robust health out here near the Equator.

Aloha.  Standing by for any pointers you can offer.

Yes you can indeed change the sex of any tree by grafting onto it. You can also have part be male (bottom) and part be female (top). My guess though is you are going to end up with a lot more female trees than you think. The females just probably flower later than the males.

[muttley]

This is fantastic news Oscar.  It is truly amazing to also learn that one can even create Borojo trees that can bear both male and female flowers. When the time comes, I will try to create such a specimen just to see if I am up to the task of pulling off the delicate surgery involved.   Now finally I know for sure that there will never be any reason to remove a single male Borojo tree from my small orchard, since they all retain value as root stock.

Your prediction that a few females are likely to appear later on also helps remove even more of the worry factor over my ongoing experiment.

Much thanks for the quick reply, and do have a great day over there in The Islands



Having managed to get Photobucket working again after much head-scratching here, I decided to add a few pictures from the Borojo farm and the immediate area.  The aerial shot, showing my catfish ponds located just downhill from the Borojo farm, was taken with a RC helicopter, and my old Landrover is parked in the lower right corner of the shot.  The orderly plantation rows at the top of the frame, stretching out to the horizon on the other side of the narrow belt of forested swampland and river, is oil palm, all belonging to a local billionaire fronting for a Chinese company.



The trail camera shots are of a swamp-dwelling antelope that is heavily hunted and thus exceedingly rare along this tiny ribbon of forest.  I see their footprints up in the farms now and then but they are strictly nocturnal whenever they leave the safety of the swamp.






Adjoining the Borojo farm I am cultivating Moringa leaves, that are processed into highly nutritious feed for my brood stock catfish.  The Moringa is planted as a companion crop with a few hundred pineapple plants on the Hugelculture ridges I built nearly two years ago by using a 'dozer to bury old lumber.




I hope these pictures appear right side up.  My computer skills are rudimentary at best.

[Felipe]

Dear Muttley, thank you for sharing the pics! This looks like paradise to me...

[fruitlovers]

Yes great shots. I really enjoyed them too! Thanks for posting.

[Mike T]

I have loads of seeds popping up now and they do look kind of like the Alibertia edulis seedlings I have but bigger.

[fruitlovers]

I have loads of seeds popping up now and they do look kind of like the Alibertia edulis seedlings I have but bigger.

There was a plan by some taxonomists to lump Borojo genus into Alibertia, but it was not succesful.

[Mike T]

Oscar I have been calling it Alibertia patinoi just following what South Americans are calling it. Maybe they are jumping the taxonomic gun.

[bangkok]

Trying Borojó with Paula

[muttley]

Hello Filipe thanks for the kind words. This area in my pictures is but a tiny enclave of unspoiled rain forest that follows the narrow course of a river, down from what was once square miles of woodland.  Unlike the pristine unspoiled beauty of the Hawaiian Islands where lucky fellas like Oscar call home, for example, Africa's natural resources are not as zealously guarded as they could be.   

Still and all I feel privileged to have scored a lease from the government of this long-ago de-forested shoreline overlooking about a half-mile of this small river's tree course, for the construction of brood-stock fish ponds, and also for my mad agricultural experiments.  After much trial and error I have narrowed down my crop selection to pineapple, moringa leaves for fish feed, Borojoa trees and some plantain.  My goal is to establish tree orchards that will form a continuous food-producing forest canopy over most of the land currently occupied by thicket.

As the temporary landlord over this narrow winding ribbon of rain forest, I am now at last able to call forest guards to do their jobs and help to politely see off any timber "harvesters" that show up uninvited with chainsaws. I'm sure if the troops of monkeys and other critters living in the "protected" swamp forest could speak, they would have sent a delegation to thank me for saving their arboreal highways and seasonal food supplies of wild-growing fruit.  I can only hope that they will return the favor by leaving my crop of fruit trees alone when they start to bear, but they may have other plans.

Hello Bangkok, I watched that Youtube video not long ago, and got the impression that in its pure form, the Borojo fruit is an acquired taste, as they say ha ha.  On the positive side though, the extraordinary concentration of protein and vitamins obtainable from this remarkable fruit will guarantee that it sells massively anywhere it hits the local market in the Third World. 

[muttley]

With apologies for re-animating a seemingly expired thread, I have an update about my Borojoa growing experiments here in Africa.   

As I mentioned last year, the most obvious challenge to growing large numbers of Borojoa in Africa is that male trees vastly outnumber females, but thanks to wisdom about grafting shared earlier in this forum by Oscar from Fruit Lovers Hawaii, I will over the coming years go about grafting female branches to all but a few of the male trees in my small plantation of a several hundred  Borojoa currently standing about 5 feet tall.

Cutting to the chase,  I can now unveil pictures of my FIRST EVER Borojoa fruit, which though still unripe on the trees, are already far bigger already than I anticipated.  It is remarkable how long it is taking, for it has been over three months now, from the time female flowers were first spotted, until the present when the fruit are so heavy that the trees are actually leaning over a bit from the weight of just a four fruit per sapling, which is what these small trees are at just 3 years of growth from seedling.

I see ENORMOUS potential for Borojoa mass cultivation in ALL tropical zones on this planet.  From my observations of the few hundred Borojoa trees on my land, it is obvious that the rate of maturity for flowering and thus for fruit production, is TWICE as fast in comparison to the 6 to 7 year fruiting time from seed, quoted for Borojoa in its native South America.  This unexpectedly fast fruiting time is a huge deal on this continent where farmers seek fast returns on planted crops.
 
Anyways before I get too carried away with the monologue,  here, for the very first time before a live audience, are exclusive, previously classified photographs my first African Borojoa fruit, with a tape measure held up to affirm that it IS all about size ha ha.






I can't wait to try this fabled fruit in a smoothie, to mask that infamous taste, and who knows, for at least part of each year I may yet be able to fashion a purely vegetarian diet that features high protein derived from Borojoa fruit grown on my own farm, without entirely departing from my usual carnivore diet, at least for the next few years.

[muttley]

Another Borojoa update is in order.  The first ever Borojoa fruit  to form on my trees are taking a LONG time to ripen and fall off the tree. Thus far the fruit have been growing very slowly but steadily bigger for about 6 months, which is by far the longest time to time to ripen for any fruit I have ever observed in nature or in horticulture.

Thus far not one of the Borojoa fruit has fallen off the tree, but bearing in mind the conventional wisdom that this fruit is only ripe and bearing its full nutritional content when it falls of the tree on its own, I will wait for that natural ripening to complete its slow course, no matter how long it takes.

In the meantime I have started off another field of Borojoa trees, and have been irrigating them heavily this dry season, rather than leave mother nature to her devices in this age of global warming.  Growth rate is considerably faster with this new irrigation regime, which makes sense since this tree is a river side dweller in its home range.

[buddyguygreen]

Thanks for sharing your progress, Keep up the good work. My borojoa are growing nicely here in Florida, im taking great care of them so hopefully i'll be getting fruit in a couple years.

[jfarmer]

Apologies for reviving this thread again, but I do think Borojo warrants more discussion...

Muttley, the pictures are beautiful and I made an account on this website after reading your story.  I am now completely inspired to start growing my own tropical fruits!

Muttley, might you be able to share an update on your Borojo plants?

[Eclissato]

what about cold tollerance?

[buddy roo]

 Hi does anyone have seeds??