Back to grocery store plants: Sweet Granadilla and Rambutan – The Bohemian Kitchen

After a long break, I am growing grocery store fruits again!

Over the past couple of years, most of my indoor growing experiments – pomegranate, peanut, and avocado, to name a few – have died of neglect. I’ve been so focused on vegetable gardening in my community garden plot that I didn’t make time for much else, which is a shame because grocery store plants are really fun to grow.

My new goal is to grow at least a few new plants this year. I’ll try for one a month and see how that goes.

I wasn’t sure where to start, so I grabbed the strangest looking fruit I could find at the T&T grocery store.

The small red things are rambutans, and the large orange fruits are sweet granadillas.

I have grown the orange fruits before. In a previous post, I claimed they were tamarillos. That’s what the Loblaws sticker said: tamarillo. One of my blog commenters pointed out that they are in fact sweet granadillas, so I fixed my post. I thought I had things straight. Then last month I found them at the T&T and they were labelled as passionfruit! But they can’t be passionfruit because aren’t they sweet granadillas? What’s going on?

I did some googling and found out through Wikipedia that these fruit are indeed sweet granadillas, which belong to the passiflora family, therefore making them related to the passionfruit. Also, in Africa and Australia the locals call them passionfruit. Mystery solved!     I cut them up and planted a few seeds. I am still weirded out by the goopy inside, so I didn’t eat any.   They took about two weeks to sprout. Out of the four soil pellets, two of them are growing. I put them on a heated mat and near the window. I want to see how big I can get them this time. As for the rambutans, well I’ve never seen them before in my life.   They are supposed to be more red than this. I bought them either too early or too late, I’m not sure which.   On the inside they look like a lychee. Wikipedia says they are native to southeast Asia and are indeed related to the lychee fruit.     I planted those too and they haven’t come up yet. The seeds are quite large, and I’ve noticed that larger seeds tend to need more time before sprouting, so maybe next month I’ll have seedling pictures to show you. If nothing comes up then I’ll buy more and try again.

Have you ever grown a rambutan or sweet granadilla? How did they turn out?

UPDATE June 17 2016: The sweet granadilla has grown!!