One of our most popular trees here at Tullamore Farm is the Panama Berry and we have them planted all around the property.
They are amazing in that they grow so quickly and fruit at about 18 months of age. Once established they can fruit for eight or nine months of the year.
The fruit is so sweet and most people love the taste.
Besides an abundance of candy like fruit which are highly nutritious they have many other uses that make them so beneficial.
We have them planted at the edges of all our orchards and we call them our sacrifice trees.
Our arrangement with the birds (not the cockatoos) is they can help themselves. They do seem to target them.
We have fruit fly traps around the edges of the orchards but for those fruit flies that avoid the traps then hopefully they target the soft sweet fruit of the Panama Berry and leave the other fruit trees alone.
We are very confident that the fruit fly that slip past the fruit fly traps make a beeline for them.
The Panama Berry in the photo is about four years old and we take the top half of the tree out about every six months, encouraging it to grow wider and not up.
We use all that biomass chopped up and spread through our banana clumps and around fruit trees where it breaks down and acts as fertiliser and mulch.
It is a soft timber and breaks down quite quickly.
Besides the fruit tasting fabulous it is quite an attractive tree and casts a great shadow. We have quite a few strategically in places to shade some trees in the summer heat. As it starts to cool down the Panama Berries used in this way get a big prune and kept short in the winter months allowing more sun in.
In our chook run we have the mandatory Mulberry tree plus we have a Panama Berry tree.
Our girls in their free range enclosure love the sweet fruit of both.
