This text is part of the special Pleasures notebook
It’s easy to imagine the joy of harvesting tropical fruits straight from the tree, all from the comfort of your own living room! Growing an orange tree, banana tree or fig tree at home is all the rage, but is it really feasible? Absolutely, provided you make the right choice when it comes to indoor trees and provide them with optimal growing conditions!
Head to the garden center
First, you must understand that harvesting and planting seeds from tropical fruits purchased at the grocery store will not lead to the development of a productive indoor fruit tree. Although sowing these seeds can produce beautiful green plants, most of them will never produce fruit. It can take years, sometimes 10, 15 or even 20 years, before a seed becomes a tree mature enough to flower. And, at this point, most trees are too big for our homes.
To successfully grow tropical fruit trees indoors, instead buy a mature dwarf tree, ready to bud, or even already in flower or fruit, specially selected for its ability to adapt to the conditions of our homes. Go to your favorite garden center, which should certainly offer them!
Interview
• Place them in full sun or at least in a location providing intense light, ideally near a large window facing south or west.
• Make sure you have access to a sunny patio or balcony to give them a summer outside, compensating for the winter months when day length is shorter. When you take them out, it is crucial to gradually acclimatize them to outdoor conditions, to avoid any risk of leaf burn.
• Water them thoroughly when the soil is dry to the touch.
• Provide them with a normal indoor temperature. This does not apply to the fig tree or the pomegranate tree, which need fresh air during the cold season.
• Fertilize them with an all-purpose fertilizer, from spring until early fall.
• Transplant your tree into a larger container shortly after purchase, then repeat the operation every two or three years.
• Do not hesitate to prune branches that are too long when spring arrives.
• Use a humidifier during the fall and winter months (except for a dormant fig or pomegranate tree).
Which tree to choose?
Indoor fig tree
Varieties of fig trees specially designed for growing indoors self-pollinate, and that’s a great advantage! This fruit tree loses its leaves during the winter. During the cold season, you should ideally put it to dry dormancy, in a slightly heated garage or veranda. You can resume watering and move it to the sun towards the end of March.
Citrus
You can choose an orange tree, a lemon tree, a grapefruit tree, a clementine tree, or more modest and accessible options like calamondin or kumquat. As long as they flower outside, their pollination is usually done by bees. When you care for them indoors, you will have to be more involved and ensure fertilization from flower to flower using a cotton swab.
Dwarf avocado tree
Make sure to keep the atmosphere humid and give it a high light intensity.
Dwarf banana tree
Each plant only bears fruit once and produces quite a remarkable number of them. It then produces a shoot which, after two or three years of growth, can itself produce fruit. Maintaining consistently high humidity is crucial for its cultivation.
Dwarf Grenadier
This small fruit shrub requires relatively simple maintenance and takes up little space. Its orange flowers are an extraordinary spectacle, but the pomegranates that are subsequently produced, although colorful and attractive, are modest in size and not very juicy. Like the fig tree, this pomegranate tree prefers to spend a cool and rather dry winter, ideally in a slightly heated garage.
Other dwarf fruit trees
There are many other dwarf tropical fruit trees that you can try growing in your indoor orchard: guava, carambola, papaya, mango, etc. Follow the same care instructions as for citrus fruits. There is no longer any excuse not to have tropical fruits on hand!
This content was produced by the Special Publications team at Duty, relating to marketing. The writing of the Duty did not take part.