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Planting
Days to maturity
Seasonal yields
Sow indoors · Direct sow · Transplant outdoors
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Plant · P-527
Barbados Cherry
Malpighia emarginata
Barbados Cherry is an evergreen shrub that produces a small, bright red cherry-like fruit eaten fresh or cooked into juice, sauce, jelly, jam or wine - and it isn't grown for flavor alone: a single glass of the juice can carry as much vitamin C as 14 liters of orange juice. It bears its first fruit from seed in as little as two or three years and then crops two or three times a year over a long picking season. Clipped as a hedge it takes shearing well and blocks wind, though it needs frost-free-to-mild winters and does not tolerate salt spray near the coast.
Record at a glance
Growing profile
- Sun
- Full Sun · Partial Sun
- USDA zone
- USDA 9–11
- Soil
- Sand · Loam · Clay
- Moisture
- Dry · Well-Drained · Moderate · Moist
Vertical layer
Shrub- Soil pH
- 5.5–7
- Plant type
- Evergreen Tree
- Mature height
- 8–13.1 ft
- Mature spread
- 10–15 ft
- Plant spacing
- 6–10 ft
- Root type
- Fibrous-shallow
- Spread pattern
- Seed
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The deeper layer
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- Primary
- Locked ecological function
- Secondary
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- Byproduct
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Behind the record
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