What is a quandong? That is the most common response I get whenever the topic comes up, unless I'm talking to someone local to my area where they not only grow naturally, but there's also small quandong farms out here in the far west semi-arid deserts of NSW, and I believe some in north western Victoria as well, so quandongs are well known around here; but mention them to any city dwellers and people start asking "What?" and that's really quite a shame. Quandongs are awesome!
I suspect the biggest problem quandongs face is a lack of interest because they're not what most people expect from a fruit. When most people think of fruit, they envision something full of juice, plump and able to be eaten straight off the plant without pulling a funny face. Something they can compare to other more familiar fruits such as plums, apples, or berries. When they first see a quandong, it disappoints them, because a quandong is almost as dry as the deserts they grow in.
The other problem quandongs face is that they have a reputation for being nigh impossible to grow. But that reputation is somewhat unwarranted. Sure, we can't just put a seed in some seed raising mix, water it, and expect it to grow and survive, nor can we take a cutting and plant or graft it to make a tree. Quandongs do require a bit of special care and conditions. These remarkable fruit grow on trees that are almost unique in that they're semi-parasitic; they're a distant relative of mistletoe. That means, much like mistletoe, they need another nearby plant to sucker onto. They don't do any harm to the other plant, but they can't just sucker onto anything, the other plant needs to be a nitrogen fixer that can withstand and survive the same sort of conditions as the quandong. Unlike a mistletoe however, they don't completely rely on the other plant, and don't fully attach to it and nothing else. A quandong's roots can reach out and feed from several plants around it, and it grows like an independent tree to look at it. Because of this semi-parasitic quality to the plant, quandongs can't be transplanted nor grown from cuttings. They have to be grown from seed and they can be a bit hard to get started, but once they're up and growing they can start bearing fruit after about 4 years and live for many long decades. They need to live in well draining low-nutrient sandy soil. Too much water, too much fertiliser, too rich a soil, and they don't like it. Other than that, quandong trees are about as tough as a plant can get. They don't suffer from the usual array of disease that most fruit trees do, they can withstand and indeed appreciate a lot of neglect, are extremely salt tolerant, and survive droughts that would wipe out crops of other kinds. One of the more endearing things about them is that a lot of birds are about as interested in eating quandongs as the average person that can't comprehend eating a dry juiceless fruit, and fruit fly don't usually want to know too much about them either.
My neighbour, recently moved here from Sydney, has a lot of quandong trees growing wild in their back yard. They didn't know what they were and were considering cutting them down until I explained and gave them a jar of quandong jam which I'd recently made from a bag of quandongs given to my son by a local quandong farmer. My new neighbours have decided to keep their trees.
I plan on seeing if I can grow some myself later on in the far back area of my yard.
So what the heck does one do with a quandong when it's not juicy? Well, they can be eaten straight from the tree, but it's a bit like eating fruit jerky. It's good, but not something everyone is going to enjoy, mostly because their flavour can be quite overwhelming. If you pick them when they're very ripe and about to fall off the branch, they'll have a very strong sweet and tart flavour. Pick them too much earlier than that, and they'll have a very strong sour and and even stronger tart flavour. The tartness seems to decrease a little as the sweetness increases. The most common use of quandongs is making jam or pies with them. They also have a lot of other potential uses. I was stunned when I suggested making quandong wine next year to my son who passed the idea onto the local farmer he got the quandongs from, and the reaction was, "That is interesting, I've never heard of anyone doing that." My reaction to that was, "WHAT? He's been growing and commercially selling them for decades, and he hasn't even heard of that idea before? How is that even possible?"
I haven't eaten a quandong pie for decades, but I can say that having quandong jam more recently, it tastes a bit like very sweet berries. The boiling process seems to reduce the tartness of the fruit somewhat, or maybe it's the addition of sugar in making the jam, but there isn't a sweeter and tastier fruit to make jam from out there that I've ever found.
So what does the fruit look like? Well, a picture tells a thousand words, so here's a photo.
The nut in the centre is about the size of a small glass marble. In fact years ago, particularly during the Great Depression, kids in this area used to play with quandong seeds, using them as marbles, jacks, and small konkers. Drill a hole through them and they can also be used as beads. But I digress...
To make quandong jam is pretty much the same as any other jam, only it needs a bit more water due to the fruit not having much juice to add to the recipe. Bring to the boil then simmer the quandong flesh until tender, then add the sugar, and I found that despite quandongs having pectin in them, I needed to add some pectin to get the jam to gel properly. I personally don't like jam with chunky fruit bits in it, I like my jam smooth, so once the quandong flesh was tender I ran the whole lot through my blender before adding the sugar and pectin and boiling it to jam. If you like fruity chunks in your jam, cut the quandong flesh into small enough pieces because it doesn't fall apart in the same way other fruits do when cooked (although it probably would if cooked long enough, I've never simmered quandongs for more than a few hours so I don't know how long it would take to achieve that effect). As for the recipe, I play it by taste, having learned how from my grandmother, but there are various recipes online that can be followed for better or worse.
Quandong pie is usually made in the same way as apple pie, or they can can be made as tarts using quandong jam. If you're into homebrewing your own country wines, quandong wine is made the same as any other fruit wine, only you don't have to mash the fruit. Soak the chopped up flesh in water and sugar for a few days to extract the flavour, and start the yeast process for an initial ferment in the fermentation container to extract as much flavour as possible before straining off the solids for the remaining fermentation process. Then of course from quandong wine can be made quandong vinegar, or quandongs can be used to infuse commercial vinegar with their fruity flavour. Other uses can include grating or shredding the quandong flesh and using it in cakes, or for a flavour boost in salads, or pretty much put them in any other meal that you want to add a sweet and tart fruity flavour to. Just remember their flavour can be quite strong, so use sparingly if you don't want to overwhelm your recipe. I have also heard of people making quandong chutney, cheese, sauce, and ice cream.
As for how to grow one, like I said, you have to start with seeds. Get them started in a pot of wet compost made from wattle and she-oak leaves and bark if you can get such things, otherwise try using another nitrogen fixing plant debri such as spent bean or pea plants. "Water" the compost by adding wet paper to it rather than watering it directly, or spray it lightly and regularly with a fine mist spray, and do whatever you can to keep the temperature warm and stable. It's an environment that composting worms will also love and they'll help keep away moulds that would otherwise try to eat your little seeds. If you can get the conditions right the seeds should start sprouting in a little over a month. It will do okay by itself for a while in a pot, but eventually it'll need to latch onto the shallow roots of a nitrogen fixing plant that can live in the same conditions to survive. Within a year it will need to come out of the pot and into the ground near a plant it can sucker to. Acacia/wattle trees and casuarinas (she-oak) are best for it as that's what they attach to in the wild, though quandongs will sucker off some other plants including grasses. It probably won't grow too well in very humid areas, but there's no harm in trying, you never know, it just might if the soil conditions are right and you can protect it from getting mouldy or drowned by too much water when it rains.
Quandong trees can grow up to 6 metres tall, but most stay much smaller than that, 2-3 metres being common, and they produce fruit seasonally on an annual basis ripening in spring. Their leaves are very typical of many Aussie trees, elongated, pointed, and with a slightly blue-grey tinge to the green, and a spindly growth habit with greyish-brown bark. Their flowers grow as adorable white little bell-shaped blooms in clusters, and when a healthy plant that had the perfect conditions bares fruit it can be quite prolific about it, turning the tree as red with fruit as it is green with leaves. When the fruit is fully ripe, the flesh separates from the seed casing and if you gently shake the quandong fruit you'll hear the seed casing rattle around inside of it.
Although they can be tricky to get started, why more people aren't at least trying to grow these amazing fruits if they have the right conditions to do so is beyond me. Especially commercially! Australia is filling up our deserts with irrigated crops of cotton and almond trees, using up a huge amount of our most precious resource - fresh water - to the detriment of both the environment and communities down river, and yet we could be growing massive farms of native fruits such as this instead and exporting completely unique quandong products to the rest of the world. It just doesn't make sense to me, but anyway, if you ever get a chance to taste something made from quandongs, don't knock it back, because if it was made well, you'll be pleasantly surprised how amazingly tasty native Australia really can be.
I suspect the biggest problem quandongs face is a lack of interest because they're not what most people expect from a fruit. When most people think of fruit, they envision something full of juice, plump and able to be eaten straight off the plant without pulling a funny face. Something they can compare to other more familiar fruits such as plums, apples, or berries. When they first see a quandong, it disappoints them, because a quandong is almost as dry as the deserts they grow in.
The other problem quandongs face is that they have a reputation for being nigh impossible to grow. But that reputation is somewhat unwarranted. Sure, we can't just put a seed in some seed raising mix, water it, and expect it to grow and survive, nor can we take a cutting and plant or graft it to make a tree. Quandongs do require a bit of special care and conditions. These remarkable fruit grow on trees that are almost unique in that they're semi-parasitic; they're a distant relative of mistletoe. That means, much like mistletoe, they need another nearby plant to sucker onto. They don't do any harm to the other plant, but they can't just sucker onto anything, the other plant needs to be a nitrogen fixer that can withstand and survive the same sort of conditions as the quandong. Unlike a mistletoe however, they don't completely rely on the other plant, and don't fully attach to it and nothing else. A quandong's roots can reach out and feed from several plants around it, and it grows like an independent tree to look at it. Because of this semi-parasitic quality to the plant, quandongs can't be transplanted nor grown from cuttings. They have to be grown from seed and they can be a bit hard to get started, but once they're up and growing they can start bearing fruit after about 4 years and live for many long decades. They need to live in well draining low-nutrient sandy soil. Too much water, too much fertiliser, too rich a soil, and they don't like it. Other than that, quandong trees are about as tough as a plant can get. They don't suffer from the usual array of disease that most fruit trees do, they can withstand and indeed appreciate a lot of neglect, are extremely salt tolerant, and survive droughts that would wipe out crops of other kinds. One of the more endearing things about them is that a lot of birds are about as interested in eating quandongs as the average person that can't comprehend eating a dry juiceless fruit, and fruit fly don't usually want to know too much about them either.
My neighbour, recently moved here from Sydney, has a lot of quandong trees growing wild in their back yard. They didn't know what they were and were considering cutting them down until I explained and gave them a jar of quandong jam which I'd recently made from a bag of quandongs given to my son by a local quandong farmer. My new neighbours have decided to keep their trees.
I plan on seeing if I can grow some myself later on in the far back area of my yard.So what the heck does one do with a quandong when it's not juicy? Well, they can be eaten straight from the tree, but it's a bit like eating fruit jerky. It's good, but not something everyone is going to enjoy, mostly because their flavour can be quite overwhelming. If you pick them when they're very ripe and about to fall off the branch, they'll have a very strong sweet and tart flavour. Pick them too much earlier than that, and they'll have a very strong sour and and even stronger tart flavour. The tartness seems to decrease a little as the sweetness increases. The most common use of quandongs is making jam or pies with them. They also have a lot of other potential uses. I was stunned when I suggested making quandong wine next year to my son who passed the idea onto the local farmer he got the quandongs from, and the reaction was, "That is interesting, I've never heard of anyone doing that." My reaction to that was, "WHAT? He's been growing and commercially selling them for decades, and he hasn't even heard of that idea before? How is that even possible?"
I haven't eaten a quandong pie for decades, but I can say that having quandong jam more recently, it tastes a bit like very sweet berries. The boiling process seems to reduce the tartness of the fruit somewhat, or maybe it's the addition of sugar in making the jam, but there isn't a sweeter and tastier fruit to make jam from out there that I've ever found.
So what does the fruit look like? Well, a picture tells a thousand words, so here's a photo.
The nut in the centre is about the size of a small glass marble. In fact years ago, particularly during the Great Depression, kids in this area used to play with quandong seeds, using them as marbles, jacks, and small konkers. Drill a hole through them and they can also be used as beads. But I digress...
To make quandong jam is pretty much the same as any other jam, only it needs a bit more water due to the fruit not having much juice to add to the recipe. Bring to the boil then simmer the quandong flesh until tender, then add the sugar, and I found that despite quandongs having pectin in them, I needed to add some pectin to get the jam to gel properly. I personally don't like jam with chunky fruit bits in it, I like my jam smooth, so once the quandong flesh was tender I ran the whole lot through my blender before adding the sugar and pectin and boiling it to jam. If you like fruity chunks in your jam, cut the quandong flesh into small enough pieces because it doesn't fall apart in the same way other fruits do when cooked (although it probably would if cooked long enough, I've never simmered quandongs for more than a few hours so I don't know how long it would take to achieve that effect). As for the recipe, I play it by taste, having learned how from my grandmother, but there are various recipes online that can be followed for better or worse.
Quandong pie is usually made in the same way as apple pie, or they can can be made as tarts using quandong jam. If you're into homebrewing your own country wines, quandong wine is made the same as any other fruit wine, only you don't have to mash the fruit. Soak the chopped up flesh in water and sugar for a few days to extract the flavour, and start the yeast process for an initial ferment in the fermentation container to extract as much flavour as possible before straining off the solids for the remaining fermentation process. Then of course from quandong wine can be made quandong vinegar, or quandongs can be used to infuse commercial vinegar with their fruity flavour. Other uses can include grating or shredding the quandong flesh and using it in cakes, or for a flavour boost in salads, or pretty much put them in any other meal that you want to add a sweet and tart fruity flavour to. Just remember their flavour can be quite strong, so use sparingly if you don't want to overwhelm your recipe. I have also heard of people making quandong chutney, cheese, sauce, and ice cream.
As for how to grow one, like I said, you have to start with seeds. Get them started in a pot of wet compost made from wattle and she-oak leaves and bark if you can get such things, otherwise try using another nitrogen fixing plant debri such as spent bean or pea plants. "Water" the compost by adding wet paper to it rather than watering it directly, or spray it lightly and regularly with a fine mist spray, and do whatever you can to keep the temperature warm and stable. It's an environment that composting worms will also love and they'll help keep away moulds that would otherwise try to eat your little seeds. If you can get the conditions right the seeds should start sprouting in a little over a month. It will do okay by itself for a while in a pot, but eventually it'll need to latch onto the shallow roots of a nitrogen fixing plant that can live in the same conditions to survive. Within a year it will need to come out of the pot and into the ground near a plant it can sucker to. Acacia/wattle trees and casuarinas (she-oak) are best for it as that's what they attach to in the wild, though quandongs will sucker off some other plants including grasses. It probably won't grow too well in very humid areas, but there's no harm in trying, you never know, it just might if the soil conditions are right and you can protect it from getting mouldy or drowned by too much water when it rains.
Quandong trees can grow up to 6 metres tall, but most stay much smaller than that, 2-3 metres being common, and they produce fruit seasonally on an annual basis ripening in spring. Their leaves are very typical of many Aussie trees, elongated, pointed, and with a slightly blue-grey tinge to the green, and a spindly growth habit with greyish-brown bark. Their flowers grow as adorable white little bell-shaped blooms in clusters, and when a healthy plant that had the perfect conditions bares fruit it can be quite prolific about it, turning the tree as red with fruit as it is green with leaves. When the fruit is fully ripe, the flesh separates from the seed casing and if you gently shake the quandong fruit you'll hear the seed casing rattle around inside of it.
Although they can be tricky to get started, why more people aren't at least trying to grow these amazing fruits if they have the right conditions to do so is beyond me. Especially commercially! Australia is filling up our deserts with irrigated crops of cotton and almond trees, using up a huge amount of our most precious resource - fresh water - to the detriment of both the environment and communities down river, and yet we could be growing massive farms of native fruits such as this instead and exporting completely unique quandong products to the rest of the world. It just doesn't make sense to me, but anyway, if you ever get a chance to taste something made from quandongs, don't knock it back, because if it was made well, you'll be pleasantly surprised how amazingly tasty native Australia really can be.
