This morning we had our first kumquat harvest. The harvest is small; around 5.5 kg. Still, I am very excited about it. We have sown the seeds about 4 years back and ever since then we have been nurturing the 6 trees very carefully.
Annapurna’s heavy clay is not very suitable for citrus. We elevated the trees somewhat by planting them in some old tractor tires and concrete rings so they are not in the waterlogged clay too much. We mixed in some red soil in the plant holes when we planted the saplings. They did pretty good.
And of course this will never be a big crop, but they are still important to us.
When Annapurna embarked on increasing banana plantations, aiming to reduce the banana purchase from the open market in PTDC (Auroville’s community distribution center), we envisioned that we would need a way to use all unsuitable fruit, and gluts as well, to make the crop economically viable.
Banana kumquat compote is a wonderful product. We are sure people will enjoy it a lot and it helps the farm to increase its banana production. Like this we are looking around all the time for delicious combinations for our banana-based compotes. Most of the compotes are sugar free because of the sweetness of the karparavalli banana.
Next in line will be the passion fruit (my favorite) which we have sown 1.5 years back and has started to produce flowers. The combination of the sweet banana and the sour passion fruit is really incredibly good!!
For people who do not know kumquat fruit:
it looks like a mini orange but has a more intense fruity sour taste and very thin skin. Looking on the internet one finds mostly the oval small variety. Ours is round and is the size of a small lime fruit.