Plant · P-219

Tamarillo

Solanum betaceum

Tamarillo is an Andean highland tree that produces egg-shaped, tart-sweet fruit eaten raw scooped from the skin or cooked into chutneys, jams, preserves, stews and soups - high in vitamins A, C and E and in iron, and it starts fruiting within two years of planting, unusually fast for a tree crop. What makes it a mountain plant rather than a lowland one is temperature at both ends: frost near 28 F kills it outright, and it also loses tolerance above about 86 F, since it evolved for cool mountain days and cool nights rather than either winter cold or summer heat. It also wants heavy year-round rainfall, well above what most gardens supply without irrigation.