Baobab Fruitfulness

How old were your parents when you were born?  Not as old as the Baobab tree has to be before it's capable of bearing fruit. It can take a Baobab tree up to 200 years before it produces its first green-brown velvety pod-shaped fruit.  January is when Baobabs start to fruit and fruit production is highly variable between trees. Some trees never produce fruit even though they flower every year. Some trees produce only a few fruit a year and others produce huge quantities. I have been monitoring baobab tree fruit production in Venda for 7 years. The record was 1200 fruit on one tree, but this was highly unusual. Mostly they average about 65 fruit per tree per year. EcoProducts only ever harvests fallen fruit to avoid harming the parent tree.

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Guardians’ bao babies 2021

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December in the southern hemisphere, Limpopo and it is time to measure the Baobab guardians’ trees again. Did they grow fatter and higher and more handsome than before? Sarah and Prince headed out on the 14th December to measure up the Guardians’ baobab babies. It’s the beginning of the growing season, the trees had not […]

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What’s in a name: baobab

Across Africa baobabs are known by many different names and we know that the fruit have been used for thousands of years. However, the first detailed botanical descriptions were made by Prospero Alpini, a 16th Century physician and botanist living in Venice who spent three years in Cairo. He first saw the fruit being sold in […]

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Living in a baobab tree

Living in a baobab tree

Here are some pictures we found of how people have used the hollow spaces within a baobab tree as living spaces – there's a bar and another has even been fitted out as a toilet! One ancient hollow Baobab tree in Zimbabwe is so large that up to 40 people can shelter inside its trunk. […]

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