Pepino Dulce -- The Cucumber Melon, explained.

I have a good local farmers market.  One stall is occupied by a woman who sells young plants of an astonishing variety.  She has the usual tomatoes, peppers, greens, herbs.  But she also offers intriguing plants, many of which I have never heard of.  This brings me back again and again to see what I want to try to grow in my yard.

What I want to share with you is the success I had with the pepino dulce I brought home last year.  I bought it just because the description said it likes growing in my area and that it makes fruit.  Once I got home, I spent time reading up on it.

Pepino dulce:  Wikipedia tells us that "Solanum muricatum is a species of evergreen shrub native to South America and grown for its sweet edible fruit."  It appears to be a native of Chile or Peru.  You can tell by the genus Solanum that it is related to tomatoes and eggplants.  Some people call it a "sweet cucumber", a cucumber melon, or a pepino melon.

I knew it would grow into a bush-like shape that would benefit from some wire support.  It needed full sun and a decent amount of watering.  I had recently made some new planting beds with automatic irrigation, so I had an appropriate place to put my new baby plant.

A tiny baby!

That was in fall of 2021.  Its growth really took off last spring.  I loved the flowers, which are white with purple stripes (or was that purple with white stripes?).

Here it is at its prime several months ago:

The bush is about 4 feet in diameter across the ground and about 2 to 3 feet tall.  You can see the fruit on it, as well as some flowers.  It is a robustly healthy plant with only a few issues from whiteflies, which did not appear to affect its growth.

I wasn't sure exactly when to harvest the fruit and ended up trying it when it was green, ripe, and very ripe.  Amazingly enough, they were all good in their way.

As the fruit ripens, it develops purple stripes.  Sometimes bold, sometimes subtle, and you might have to look hard, but you can find them.

When they still have a greenish tinge, they are not fully ripe.

Greenish with stripes, but starting to change to cream-colored.

You can still eat them.  They are firm, almost crispy, and they taste just like cucumbers.  I ate them raw, sliced into a salad like a cucumber.  Very nice!  I also pan-fried them in a little olive oil and dressed them with a sprinkling of salt and pepper.  Still good!

The next color phase is cream heading to yellow-cream.  The fruit feels a little softer, but not by much.  At this stage it is starting to taste more like a honeydew melon, just not as sweet.  It is juicy, mild, and refreshing.  I call this ripe.

Very ripe is when the fruit may be even more yellow-cream colored, it softer, and has a distinctly banana-like scent to it.  

There are both ripe and very ripe examples here.

Visually they might be the same but the banana scent is very distinctive.  The skin slips off easily.  It is more a food I would add to a fruit salad instead of a tossed green salad.

The skin, core, and seeds are edible, but I prefer to cut out the core and seeds.  Some people I have had taste it prefer to remove the skin.  

Sometimes there is a space between the seeds/core and the fruit.

The ripe and very ripe are good to eat in slices, just as they are.  I haven't tried mixing them with other fruits in a salad or other dish.  They do pair quite nicely with gouda cheese and similar mild, white cheeses.  I have put them out with a cheese platter and enjoyed them a lot.

What's interesting is that, despite the banana scent, they do not taste like bananas at all, not even a hint.  They continue to taste like less-sweet honeydew melons.  

Here in Southern California we are on watering restrictions because of the drought, so my pepino dulce plant is looking stressed.  It still has young fruit on it and is supposed to be a perennial, so I am hoping I won't lose it and I can see what it does next year.

I enjoy the fruit, though not everyone does.  One guest taster said it made her burp just like cucumbers do.  Several guest tasters liked it enough to request cuttings for their own yards.  I read that the plant can reproduce by seed but does better from cuttings.  I currently have four cuttings enthusiastically sprouting roots while in glass jars with water.  They will go into pots soon.  (Update:  Once they were put in pots and set out in the yard to start hardening, the bunnies ate them down to the dirt.  I guess I have to try again!)