The Tribune

I have a niece moving into a new home with a small but bare garden ready for planting out. She wanted some fruit trees but space was limited. No problem, I told her Carambola would fit the bill.

The carambola (Averrhoa carambola) is a tree that will happily grow to 20 or 30 feet but is quite easy to keep pruned to 12 feet with little loss in fruit production. The tree is attractive with delicate compound leaves that show traces of pink when young. The flowers are pink and mauve and cluster along the branches, and sometimes on the trunk of the tree. The yellow fruits are produced in masses.

An individual fruit is five-fluted normally, though I have come across odd fruits with four or six flutes. The fruits vary in length from four to six inches and can be sliced cross-wise to produce attractive star shapes. Cut this way the fruit is easy to share amongst a group of children and can be used as a tasty addition to salads or as an attractive garnish to a host of dishes.

Carambola comes to us from Sri Lanka, the Moluccas and Malaysia. It has remained a fairly minor fruit on the world scene because virtually its only use is as a fresh product. The shape of the carambola fruit makes transportation a problem and the industry has developed special carambola trays to avoid bruising. These, of course, add to the cost and fresh carambolas in the store are very expensive.

In the garden they are very cheap. One tree can produce hundreds of fruits in a season. The carambola puts out two flushes of fruit production, one in July and the next in October. Because the second flowering occurs while fruits are on the tree it seems like one long fruiting season instead of two.

A nursery tree will produce fruit in the first or second year after being transplanted to the garden. Carambola is not a fussy plant and will tolerate a wide range of soil conditions. One thing it does demand is some shelter from prevailing winds. Although a carambola tree is a reliable producer of fruit, all can be lost to a tropical storm or hurricane. The trees can take quite a bit of shade but can also take full sun on the south side of a building.

The carambola fruit is mildly acid and fairly innocuous in taste when at the young stage. The standard variety is Golden Star but Arkin grows larger and has sweeter taste. The best tasting of all is Fuang Tung, a variety from Thailand that is small but sweet and can be distinguished by its green flute spines.

Care must be taken in giving carambola fruits to children. The juice contains oxalic acid crystals and these may cause choking, particularly in an infant. If the fruits are picked when they turn from a canary yellow towards an amber shade then the problem with oxalic acid is resolved. A really ripe carambola has a deep wine-y flavour and full sweetness.

A carambola tree in a small garden can be pruned in February or March and kept to a height of eight to ten feet. This makes fruit picking easy. A small pruned tree gives as much fruit as one allowed to grow naturally.

If a tree is left unpruned you will eventually need a long fruit picker to reach fruits and in time there will be many that are completely out of reach. A fruit that falls from the tree is too damaged to be edible.

What you get with a carambola tree is early fruit, a heavy harvest from July to January, and little in the way of maintenance. Very few fruit trees are as productive as carambolas. In fact, I cannot think of any.

• gardenerjack@coralwave.com