Spicy Stop

Take a look. Is this a farm in the Heartland? Not exactly. It’s more of an exhibition. A showcase for the exotic, the thorny, and just the plain strange. This is the Fruit and Spice Park; just south of Miami is a thirty-nine acre garden of eccentric edibles from around the world.

Manager Chris Rollins points out, “The Fruit and Spice Park started in 1944 as a reflection of our horticultural and agricultural community here. Literally when this place was homesteaded in 1900, people immediately came here and began to plant avocados and mangos and bananas and papayas.”

The park’s “crops,” if you will, have grown considerably more exotic in the years since. Its visitors today can observe more than 5-hundred varieties of fruits, vegetables, spices, herbs, and nuts.
    
Manager Chris Rollins points out, “This is a black Sapote, the chocolate pudding from Guatemala and Southern Mexico. You can tell it’s a persimmon because it has this little cap around the top here and look how organic is with all those ants, running around.
This one would need a day or two to ripen.” Cutting it open Chris says, “You can see why it’s called chocolate pudding fruit. It looks like chocolate pudding, with some seeds. And I wish it tasted like chocolate. It tastes very sweet and it’s very pleasant.”

South Florida, of course is the perfect corner of the Heartland to grow delicacies like these. The area enjoys the only bona-fide tropical climate in the continental United States.

That fact is not lost on the state’s 40-thousand commercial farms… but they’re not growing “jaboticaba” or “gac.” Chris Rollins points to another tree and says, “Botanists call this a cauliflorous flowering habit because the flowers come right out of the trunk from all these little knobs that you see. And this tree will fruit as many as five times a year." Five times a year?

Pointing to another plant, Chris says, “This is a real, well this is one of our crowd pleasers with gardeners in south Florida. This is probably a 30-year-old tree here. It's not very big. It's called a jaboticaba and it's from southern Brazil. You know when you- people hear Brazil, they immediately think of the rain forest, but southern Brazil is a subtropical climate, and there are a lot of trees from that part of Brazil that are quite interesting.”

Chris points out another unusual plant, “Now we're going to find some gac. We got a beauty right here that's ready to go, and uh.. You know, it's a vine, a cucurbit, it's a perennial, and it’ll grow for a number of years, ten years in the same spot. Now this'll turn bright orange when it's ready to go, and the inside of course is the real surprise.”

And who eats these? Chris says they came originally from Southeast Asia, Vietnam, and North Vietnam. "Now, some of the colloquial names for this is Devil's Guts, but g-a-c, gac is the most widely used name, and this goop is around a bright red seed. Consumers can eat part of the melon, but it’s the bright red pieces inside that give it its colorful name."

For their part, Chris Rollins and his staff “relish” bringing visitors in on some of the secrets of this little corner of the world of farming and food. Miami-Dade County owns and operates the park, and some small farmers out there might like the idea of charging visitors five bucks to get in. But you better have at least a couple dozen different kinds of things like mangos, bananas, and bamboo lying around not to mention a little tram, built just for getting your guests to the guavas.

Some Facts about Fruit.
The history of fruits and vegetables is a history of give and take. Tomatoes, avocados and sweet corn were brought back to Europe by early explorers who, themselves, introduced the pineapple and carrots to the New World. By the way, potatoes originated in South America and traveled to Europe in the 1500’s. Many people didn’t use the vegetable for food, but only grew the plant for ornamental purposes.