Tzimbalo Melon Pear

I tasted a few of these throughout the season, and they were bitter and awful. I found one today that was bigger than I sampled the others, and had a little give to it. Sweet and different, maybe a little like a ground cherry.

I planted 6 Tzimbalo's that I started from seed indoors. They got off to a slow start, but that was probably due to the cool Spring weather. Once they took off, I had to reign them in as they began to take over the garden. They had beautiful white flowers and liked all of the rain that we received from Mother Nature. The fruits took forever to ripen, but everything was late this season. When the frost came, I had buckets and buckets of unripe fruit. I picked them all and put them in the basement where they continued to ripen. My biggest issue with the fruits is that I didn't know what to do with them! They have a tough outer skin that prevented me from eating them raw. The insides tasted like a fruity cucumber. I searched all over the internet for some recipes, but found nothing. I finally resorted to pickling them. They held up well in my basement. Some had dehydrated, but after 3 months, there were still a lot of melons that were available for the pickling experiment.

This is a very robust, attractive, and easy to grow plant. The fruit are extremely plentiful and pretty--looking like little watermelons. I found the flavor of the unripe fruit sort of pleasant--a little bitter, cucumber, with faint tropical undertones. I suspect that I would like the ripe fruit--but never got to taste them. I tried to ripen them inside--but it didn't work--and when the weather cooled beyond what tomatoes would happily tolerate it started to die off without the fruit ripening. Since it was a big plant I took it out to plant fall crops. I think that it would likely prosper in zone 7 or 8.

These spent two years in a pot, flowering ( hot dry climate), finally produced three fruits and died. Fruits are mediocre, nothing special. Nice curiosity, but really not worth the trouble for real fruit production...

I grew a couple of these in 2 gallon pots in full sun. They did very well and produced a substantial crop. Fruit did not drop: it was easy to allow the fruit to fully ripen until they were quite sweet. Fruit was also very rot resistant on the vine: I was able to pick firm, unblemished fruit even after the vines had died. My problem was the aftertaste, which was worse than artificial sweeteners. I ate a total of about 4 fruit. Various visitors liked the fruit: maybe most people aren't as picy about sweetener aftertastes as I am. That's the reason I won't grow it again.