it's late summer and our pomegranates are ripe and ready to pick and look at
the color of this beautiful fruit this is the wonderful and you can see where
it gets its name from obviously it's just a deep rich red colored fruit the
skins got this beautiful blush on it but of course it's the seeds that we're all
interested in or the vesicles that surround the seed which is a beautiful
red juicy parts of the fruit that we all know and adore and they're absolutely
delicious squeezed into juice you can sprinkle them in salads you can decorate
dishes with them they're so versatile and so beautiful you're going to fall in
love with a pomegranate if you grow one in your garden I absolutely love growing
pomegranates I love them because they're hardy and I love them because they're
beautiful in the spring they have the most gorgeous scarlet red flowers that
smother the tree and it's just like a showy splash of color in my orchard and
then in summer I get these beautiful fruit and not only do they look
beautiful but they taste great so what is not to love about growing a
pomegranate the pomegranate is also really well suited to small spaces it's
a small tree or a shrub you can easily keep it to two meters or less if you let
it grow it can grow four to five meters maximum you can grow them in pots and
you can even get a dwarf parfianka pomegranate which is perfect for pots or
really ideal for small spaces so there's a variety that suits everybody they do
best with cross pollination so although they are self-fertile you will get a better
crop on all your trees if you grow two different varieties and that
way you cross pollinate your plants and you maximize the crop on each tree
so if you have the space indulge in pomegranates and grow a few different
ones because you're really going to enjoy having them in your garden. They're
deciduous so they drop their leaves in the winter
great for hedges and screens if you don't mind the fact that in the winter
they're going to let the light through. You'll absolutely love them prune them
back to keep them compact and just be aware when you do that that the tips of
the branches are quite spiky they have little thorns at the end so wear a good
pair of leather gloves to protect yourself from being spiked
now the other fabulous thing about them they're long-lived
they'll live for 200 years so they're going to outlive you for sure they're
productive you're going to get stacks of fruit they taste delicious they're frost
hardy they're hardy to droughts which Australia suffers from so I just
absolutely love growing the pomegranate and the wonderful is an excellent choice
it's got this beautiful color great sized fruit look at that and absolutely
delicious and what people want to know is what are the seeds like are they soft
or hard? Well in the wonderful they are soft I can feel them they're sort of chewy
they're certainly not hard and uncomfortable you can easily sieve them
out if you're making juice or if you're putting them in salads they just add
texture and fiber I'm going to show you how to get into the fruit because it
really is a great trick to cutting them so you reveal all these beautiful
vesicles. So how do you know when your fruit are ripe, well firstly they're going
to look large and colorful on your tree and secondly if you tap them they've got
a metallic sound to them and if you just pick them up on the plant and feel
they're really heavy and that means that they're full of juice and it's really
worth at that stage once you've done those tests to pick one and cut it open
and see what the colors like inside because once they're ripe they're going
to have a really rich full color so test one before you pick the whole crop and
I'm just going to show you a really great way to cut up your pomegranates to
get the most out of them and to make the vesicles really easy to get at so this
is the top of the fruit where it's attached to the tree and the base and
what we're going to do is we're going to cut the bottom off the fruit,
so you can see then you reveal that it's got different segments and what we're going
to do is we're going to cut down those segments just by scouring the skin
and I've basically made five cuts and then I can just simply break it open and
reveal all the beautiful seeds inside and you can do that with each segment it
makes getting into the fruit really easy it makes getting it the vesicles really
easy and you can eat them straight out of the fruit they're really beautiful so
like me fall in love with pomegranates you really won't be sorry if you grow your own
my name is Kath Kermode thank you for watching this video
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