Do You know Epiphyllum Fruit?

Today I harvested my own Epiphyllum fruit!

Some of the earliest photos of my photo blog last year were images of my beautiful Epiphyllum cactus that is blooming each spring/early summer and creates huge blossoms.

Most of the year the plant is hanging on my balcony and I leave it alone besides watering it from time to time.

When I put it back inside in October, I forgot to remove the remnants of 2 blossoms which I normally do in order to save the loss of energy of the plant. Creating these huge blossoms always makes the poor cactus look like a very old woman afterwards and it takes some time for her (I think she is female) to get back in good shape again.

During winter time she only gets a thimble full of water and when I looked a few weeks ago I realized to my big surprise that she had produced 2 lovely fruits, about an inch!! big, purple red and shiny. I have never seen fruits like this on an Epiphyllum – especially not that size.

So I waited until today to see what would happen. Today I realized that one of the fruits had shrivelled back into one third of its size – it had been eaten by a tiny caterpillar – so I took it off. I also removed the second fruit because I did not want to feed some more caterpillars which tend to eat my orchids then. Of course I was very curious about the fruit, cut it open and realized that it had some lovely flesh inside with tiny black seeds. It looked like a passion-fruit inside and the smell was a bit similar – a mixture between a lemon and a passion-fruit. And as I am even a bit more curious of course, I took a spoon in order to test the fruit. It was absolutely lovely: sweet and delicious, the taste similar to a lime fruit but much sweeter.

Look at these photos…

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Now I hope that they were not poisonous…