Though the time it’s taken this grumichama to grow has been ridiculous.

Mom sent these pictures recently of the grumichama in the Great South Florida Food Forest Project:

I wrote the following in the second edition of Create Your Own Florida Food Forest:

We planted a grumichama around eight years ago in The Great South Florida Food Forest Project. Right now it’s still only a couple of feet tall.

As Morton writes, “The grumichama is of slow growth when young unless raised in a mixture of peat moss and sand and then given a thick layer of peat moss around the roots when setting out, and kept heavily fertilized. In Hawaii, it has taken 7 years to reach 7 ft. Fruiting begins when the plants are 4 to 5 years old.”

Maybe that’s it, but holy moly, that thing is a dog. Having read about its delicious fruit and beautiful appearance, I eagerly planted one, then it sat.

For years.

I’m sure it doesn’t like the lousy sand, but it has been mulched and fed now and again, though not regularly. It has been way outpaced by the other trees and still refuses to grow much, though this year it bloomed, then failed to set fruit. What a tree! How amazing!

If you decide to grow a grumichama, maybe you’ll have better luck. They should grow from fresh seeds, if you can find them, and should definitely fruit within three hundred years of germination.

This is what the tree looked like when we planted it in 2015:

9 years later, it’s now looking good.

Well, at least it’s alive! Can’t saw that about the cashew, the Navel orange, the Key Limequat, the Cinnamon, the cocoa or the Jackfruit we planted.

Basically, my field report on growing grumichama is now:

Grumichama: Takes forever to grow, but also good at not dying. 

It really got almost no care, poor thing.

Maybe we’ll start getting fruit now.