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Planting
Days to maturity
Seasonal yields
Sow indoors · Direct sow · Transplant outdoors
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Plant · P-523
Miracle Fruit
Synsepalum dulcificum
Miracle Fruit is a slow-growing tropical shrub grown for a small red berry that contains no sugar but tricks the tongue into tasting sour food as sweet, an effect that lasts fifteen minutes to an hour after eating one. The berry is fragile and does not keep, so it is used where it is picked, to make sour fruit, unsweetened preserves or citrus taste sugared. It needs distinctly acid soil and cannot take frost or alkaline ground, so where winters freeze or soil runs alkaline it is best grown as a container plant kept under cover.
Record at a glance
Growing profile
- Sun
- Full Sun · Partial Sun
- USDA zone
- USDA 10–11
- Soil
- Sand
- Moisture
- Well-Drained · Moist
Vertical layer
Shrub- Soil pH
- 4–5.5
- Plant type
- Evergreen Tree
- Mature height
- 3–15 ft
- Mature spread
- 8.6–19.2 ft
- Plant spacing
- 6.6–9.8 ft
- Root type
- Fibrous-shallow
- Spread pattern
- None
Keep exploring
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The deeper layer
Plan what comes next.
- Primary
- Locked ecological function
- Secondary
- Locked ecological function
- Byproduct
- Locked ecological function
Behind the record
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