The reason I started growing rare tropical fruits is complicated, and has some elements of what a lot of other people here have experienced. This story is more than people on an anonymous forum need to know, but some may enjoy reading it and take some inspiration from the role this fruit has played in my life.
As a kid, I was obsessed with produce. I just had a taste for it. I remember being 2 years old and sitting in the grocery cart, biting directly into onions through their mesh bags. I could not get enough vegetables and fruits, from the beginning. I grew up in the NE of the US, in an area that snowed 8 months out of every year. I got full strong sunlight only about 2 months a year, which I found depressing. Eating tropical fruit was a very rare occurrence for me - I got to try pineapple about once a year, and once every 2 years, a coconut (which I hated but I now understand is because they were always rotten). But I used to adore the idea of tropical living. I had never been anywhere tropical, but from early days I started drawing pictures of tropical scenes on my schoolwork. I knew I wanted to live in a place like that. At the time I was trapped in a very abusive household, so I guess like many people, I also saw the tropics as an escape. I was always planning my future life someday far, far away from where I was, where my parents would never find me, where I could hike through jungle, pick ripe colorful fruit from trees right overhead, and eat them on a beach with turquoise surf. Over time, the thought of tropical fruit in my mind kind of blended with safety.
After years of wanting to be, I finally became fully vegetarian at 12 years old after an unfortunate meat incident that made me put my foot down about what would enter my body, for good. Because of the dietary restrictions, and because I had always had to cook my own food, I became increasingly focused on foods from diverse cultures, many of which were tropical and focused much of their flavors on produce. In the vegetarian cookbooks I found, I realized there were a whole lot of ingredients I had never heard of before. This lead me to search out stores I had not previously been to, where I encountered some fruit I had never seen or heard of in my life. I tended to make up my own recipes, and I adored spicy food, so when I was 15 I got my hands on a starfruit, a persimmon, and a mango, none of which I'd ever heard of before, and made them blackened cajun-style with some vegetables (not sure where I got that idea) - it was one of the best meals I've ever eaten! So that made me a lot more curious about trying new fruits.
At 19, I had already long left that family behind, and I was homeless. I got an opportunity to borrow some money from a friend for a plane ticket to Central America for 4 months, where I assumed it was cheaper to be homeless, while waiting for a school in the Big City to open up their student housing for me. It was there that I first actually SAW jungle, and tropical beach, and tried my first ever guanabana, mora, papaya... and for the first time in my life got to try fresh pineapple, bananas, and coconuts, and realized they are NOTHING like the rotted or tasteless fruits I had tried back home. It blew my mind. Fruit there was cheap or free, so I got to eat it every single day.
When I moved back to the Big City (my plan fortunately having worked out) I immediately found that my favorite place was Chinatown, where I frequently went to try every new fruit and vegetable I could get my hands on. It was in a tiny out of the way Malaysian restaurant that became my favorite, where I had my first ever lychees. And I feel in love... After that I bought them from street vendors whenever I could!
Over the course of a few years I got several degrees, and moved to different cities. My life seemed hopelessly urban, as I needed to be where my academics, and my work, were. I kept dreaming of a tropical life where I could pick that fresh exotic fruit, but it seemed impossible to do it anytime before I reached 80. I continued to travel around the world and try new things, but in the end I always had to come back to the city and to my regular life. I ended up in a marriage that was at first a fairytale, and over more than a decade became a nightmare. I started dreaming of that tropical escape again, just like I had when hiding from my family of origin.
Then, I got sick. It took nearly a year to get an accurate diagnosis, that I was fighting a life-threatening disease - one that had no cure, or even approved treatment. Experimental drugs were extremely expensive. My doctors kept telling me I needed to fill myself with electrolytes - they recommended coconut water as the best source. They also pushed anti-oxidants. These things were outrageously expensive. Each serving of coconut water cost between $2-6, depending on how fresh it was. The fresh produce, especially "super-foods," were also way beyond my budget, and my husband was constantly pushing me to not spend any money on these things that were supposed to help my body fight. I learned about fruit like Acai, Maqui, Gogi... and realized there were far more fruits in the world than I had imagined! I wanted to try them all, for the fun of it as much as for the health. I realized that if I could grow my own coconuts, and some of my own produce, I could maybe afford to keep myself alive. I decided that life was short, and got a divorce before I wasted another precious second on someone who was so bent on destroying me.
I was homeless again for a while, and too sick to care for myself. It was scary. I spent a lot of the time bedridden, dreaming of a tropical home where I could grow my own exotic fruit. I got an amazing opportunity through my work, and all of a sudden, that dream had a chance to come true. While I waited to see whether or not I would get this chance to buy my own home in a tropical location, I planned out my dream of what this ideal home might look like. I didn't think I would ever have this kind of chance, but just for fun, I started pasting pictures of tropical plants online onto a document I was making of everything I would buy someday long into the future, if I got to live that long, and if things miraculously worked out. I found that nearly every search landed me on a site called "Top Tropicals," and through browsing their website I came to learn about, and cut out images of more than 100 different tropical fruits I wanted someday, in an ideal life.
Then, suddenly the dream came true. An investment I made proved correct. I was able to buy the house. The house I ended up with had a way bigger yard than I ever would have imagined. The yard had 6 mature coconut trees loaded with green coconuts to give me a near-endless supply of coconut water and young meat. I had just enough savings left to fill that yard with fruit trees. I initially just wanted my first lychee, and no one nearby had one for sale. I was too sick to drive far away. So I looked on Top Tropicals, and there was a Sweetheart lychee. And... there were some other fruits that I happened to have already put on my list. And before I knew it, I was dragging myself out of bed to dig up coral boulders in the yard as my physical therapy. More than 100 different fruit species. I love variety, and the challenge and wonder of new things. I bought many plants that were large size or fruit young, because I didn't know if I would be alive long enough to eat fruit that took several years to mature. I also focused on natives, because they are good for my local environment, and have a lot of medicinal properties so they're good for me, too! I needed things that were either worth the effort physically for my ultimate health in consuming, or would easily survive here and provide me with endless free food. I became too sick to work at all, or to go to the store much, so I knew the produce would be a necessary part of survival, and growing it just steps away from my bed made it easy to feed myself. I grew container fruits out of necessity, because I sometimes am to sick to walk more than a few feet and the food was right there. Also, if there were a hurricane that first year, I could perhaps survive the aftermath with what I had growing just in my house, not to mention outside.
Interestingly enough, the fruit gave me something I didn't expect. I started feeling like I had a need to stay alive, because my plants would all die if I did! I couldn't bear having put in all that work to grow them - literally a lot of blood, sweat, and tears - and letting them all dry up and fall apart, lol! I had a responsibility for all those lives! I also had something to look forward to: if I lived to the next season, I would see my new leaves, or my first blossoms, or my first fruit of a particular species. Then I lived through the first year, and started to get stronger. I'm not cured by any means, I'm still sick and likely always will be unless they find a cure... but I started to get a bit better and I started to want to be around long enough to see more kinds of fruit, and my first big crops of some of the more mature trees. I want to try more and more kinds of fruit I have never seen or tasted in my life before, and that means sticking around for a few years yet to see some of them fruit because for many, I am the only person I know nearby who grows them, or even knows what they are.
Growing these rare tropical fruits has been harder than I ever would have imagined. I naively assumed that if you show up to a tropical climate and start planting tropical fruit, it will grow. LOL! Not so... But, it has been an amazing journey to learn about all of this fruit, and to watch these beautiful plants reach up toward the sky and branch out. Tropical fruit has already brought a lot more to my life than I ever expected. It led me to my current life, it is part of how I continue to keep living, and it gives me a joy that when I'm really violently sick, almost nothing else does. It gives me reasons to live and to plant more seeds, so I can watch them grow the next day.
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Incidentally, this is an awesome thread idea. I am surprised to read all the different stories, which is why I decided to post mine. It is clear that tropical fruit brings people from all over the world together, across cultures, climates, religions, socioeconomic backgrounds, types of families, across varying politics and different interests. I suggest that someone on this forum put together a book, perhaps soliciting longer-version stories from people for chapters or at least sections of chapters, demonstrating how this common thread to all of us - Rare Tropical Fruit - actually links people all over the world. The stories on this thread fascinate me, and I bet they, and the universal message of how this food (and hobby) connects us, would fascinate others.
Topic: Why and when did you start collecting rare fruit. (Read 12911 times)