more. A moderately large herbal bonsai can provide homegrown fresh herbs in sufficient quantity to supply a household. Growing herbs indoors can be a little trickier than cultivating tropical plant varieties, but the idea of consuming your bonsai trimmings leads naturally to considering a fruiting bonsai that provides a usable harvest.
It seems a little incongruous to think of a bonsai tree providing enough harvest to amount to much, but bonsai don’t have to be miniature. Even traditional Japanese classifications include bonsai up to six feet tall. An edible fig or a citrus tree of that size can provide an amazing amount of fruit. I have harvested enough of these fruits to make jam and to ferment into wine (although I will admit to freezing an entire crop and using a couple of crops to make two cases of wine). A friend asked whether I pour tiny glasses of bonsai wine. I replied, “Of course, we use sake cups to help provide the proper ceremonial courtesy when sharing such a rare vintage.”
Limequat Mariachi wine.
Citrus trees have an added advantage in that most citrus fruits can sit on a tree for several months after becoming ripe without going bad, and can be picked fresh when ready to use. With a small collection of several varieties of citrus, it is possible to have fresh citrus to pick nearly 365 days a year, even in places like my home in the Colorado mountains. You may not be able to pick one every single day of the year, but it is quite reasonable to expect to pick a couple of fruits a week for cooking purposes. Varieties with smaller fruits have more appeal strictly as bonsai specimens, and also provide a bigger crop than large-fruited varieties. These small varieties include calamondin orange, kumquat, Key lime, and the harder-to-find limequat (a lime-kumquat cross). The limequat is the heaviest bearer of fruit in my experience, and my calamondins here in Colorado usually produce two crops a year.
Limequats, a lime-kumquat cross, are a little smaller than an egg and turn yellow when ripe. Though sour, they have great flavor, and can be used peel and all in many kinds of cooking.
Though many people grow ornamental ficus trees in their homes, they seldom grow the species that produce edible figs. There are many cultivated varieties, of which Ficus carica is the most prevalent. Th e “standard” ficus, which resembles a lollipop stuck in a five-gallon nursery pot, is one of the most common houseplants sold in the plant industry, and is widely used in interior landscaping. An edible fig variety of the same size can produce several dozen fresh figs every summer. There are some differences in care and appearance between ornamental and edible figs that might seem daunting, but the benefit of obtaining fresh fruit from houseplants outweighs many other considerations.
This bowl of limequats made seven half-pints of limequat marmalade; the rest was fermented into three cases of wine.
Many dedicated coffee and tea drinkers don’t realize that these plants are rather easy to grow as houseplants. The camellia, a popular flowering tree that blooms in mid-winter, is often grown as a houseplant in northern climates. Camellia sinensis, the tea plant, has smaller, less spectacular flowers than ornamental camellia varieties, but the white flowers are numerous and the blooming season lasts longer. Green tea plants and seeds can be found and purchased online. A regular tea drinker may not be able to grow their entire supply, but any amount of homegrown tea is a worthy addition to a collection of teas.
Coffee trees can be easy to find. Large trees produce many beans; some of the large foliage growers in Florida will throw a handful of coffee beans into four-inch pots and include the seedlings in their shipments of mixed-foliage plants. I’ve found these pots of coffee trees mixed into inexpensive foliage collections at garden centers all over the country. Coffee trees take some time to begin producing beans, but I have not only produced beans in Colorado from plants that started as six-inch seedlings, but have seen a six-foot coffee tree in Montana so loaded with beans there was fear the branches would break. Again, houseplants cannot be expected to offer a full supply of coffee, but the ability to offer coffee harvested from the beautiful tree in your living room on special occasions is priceless.
This thirty-inch dwarf pomegranate, cultivated from a five-gallon nursery stock plant, has been in training for seven months.
These fruits are considered ornamental. While their quality doesn’t compare to that of full-sized commercial pomegranates, they are beautiful and technically edible.
A few edible species are becoming more common in indoor tropical bonsai collections, particularly Australian cherry (Eugenia paniculata), dwarf pomegranate (Punica granatum var. nana), Barbados cherry (Malpighia emarginata), and Natal plum (Carissa macrocarpa). All of these are easy to find and have several varieties available, some of which are known to produce more fruit than others. Natal plums are used extensively in landscaping in the desert Southwest and should be easy to find at nurseries in that area. Dwarf pomegranates, which can flower and fruit heavily, are becoming very popular as bonsai specimens. Large fruiting pomegranate varieties have larger leaves that may go deciduous for a period; they aren’t as attractive as the dwarf variety, but they do bear much larger fruit. The heavier flowering and fruiting varieties of Australian cherry are widely sold at local nurseries as large topiary specimens, but the miniature varieties that make the most spectacular bonsai only flower sporadically, and in twenty years of growing them, I have never seen them bear fruit.
Miniature Australian cherries seldom flower. This specimen is sixteen inches tall.
Several species of guava, including the strawberry guava (Psidium cattleanum), lemon guava (Psidium littorale) and pineapple guava (Feijoa sellowiana), produce delightful fruit and can be grown indoors. Papayas can be grown from seed out of fruit from the market; I have grown them from seed to fruiting in Colorado. Avocados, easily sprouted from their large pits, can be shaped into interesting bonsai, although they are unlikely to fruit in the home. Many people grow jasmine and hibiscus as flowering plants without realizing that these flowers are quite useful in herbal teas; I have also made wine from the flowers of my bonsai jasmine and hibiscus specimens. While not technically edible, aromatic tropical trees like camphor, New Zealand tea tree, and eucalyptus can be grown as bonsai and provide a useful harvest. Furthermore, many unusual tropical fruits that are little known outside of their native areas could be experimented with as edible bonsai. I recommend experimenting with what you find locally, or seeking out any variety that captures your imagination. With the vastness of the Internet to search for unique varieties, the possibilities are endless.
Bonsai plants have a reputation for being very easy to kill and hard to grow, and for requiring a lot of time-consuming, detailed work. People are afraid to prune the tops of their plants, much less trim the roots of their valuable aged specimen. People who are afraid to prune their houseplants end up with long, spindly stems reaching for the ceiling with a little tuft of foliage on top. Pruning such a plant in order to produce a pleasing shape is easy, and creates a stronger, more stable plant. This is not much different from shaping a plant as a bonsai. When a plant is intended to produce a crop, some considerations may be different from traditional bonsai practice, outweighing ideals like always maintaining a perfect shape. Larger, fuller crowns are needed for a good-sized crop, making the sparser, heavily pruned style of bonsai unsuitable if production is important. Some desirable fruiting specimens, including the large-fruited citrus varieties like full-sized lemons, limes, oranges, and grapefruit, have leaves that are larger than would be desired in a more traditional bonsai style.
