Delicious Fruit - Cranberry

 

Cranberries are a group of evergreen dwarf shrubs or trailing vines in the subgenus Oxycoccus of the genus Vaccinium. In some methods of classification, Oxycoccus is regarded as a genus in its own right. They can be found in acidic bogs throughout the cooler regions of the northern hemisphere.

Cranberries are low, creeping shrubs or vines up to 2 metres (7 ft) long and 5 to 20 centimetres (2 to 8 in) in height; they have slender, wiry stems that are not thickly woody and have small evergreen leaves. The flowers are dark pink, with very distinct reflexed petals, leaving the style and stamens fully exposed and pointing forward. They are pollinated by bees. The fruit is a berry that is larger than the leaves of the plant; it is initially white, but turns a deep red when fully ripe. It is edible, with an acidic taste that can overwhelm its sweetness.

Cranberries are a major commercial crop in certain American states and Canadian provinces (see cultivation and uses below). Most cranberries are processed into products such as juice, sauce, jam, and sweetened dried cranberries, with the remainder sold fresh to consumers. Cranberry sauce is regarded as an indispensable part of traditional American and Canadian Thanksgiving menus and some European winter festivals.

Since the early 21st century within the global functional food industry, raw cranberries have been marketed as a "superfruit" due to their nutrient content and antioxidant qualities.

 

Healthy Fruit - Eggplant

The eggplant, aubergine, melongene, brinjal or guinea squash (Solanum melongena) is a plant of the family Solanaceae (also known as the nightshades) and genus Solanum. It bears a fruit of the same name, commonly used in cooking. As a nightshade, it is closely related to the tomato and potato. It is native to India.

It is a delicate perennial often cultivated as an annual. It grows 40 to 150 cm (16 to 57 in) tall, with large coarsely lobed leaves that are 10 to 20 cm (4–8 in) long and 5 to 10 cm (2–4 in) broad. Semiwild types can grow much larger, to 225 cm (7 ft) with large leaves over 30 cm (12 in) long and 15 cm (6 in) broad. The stem is often spiny. The flowers are white to purple, with a five-lobed corolla and yellow stamens. The fruit is fleshy, has a meaty texture, and is less than 3 cm (1.2 in) in diameter on wild plants, but much larger in cultivated forms.

The fruit is botanically classified as a berry and contains numerous small, soft seeds which are edible, but have a bitter taste because they contain nicotinoid alkaloids; this is unsurprising as it is a close relative of tobacco.

 

Delicious Fruit - Peumo (Cryptocarya alba)

Cryptocarya alba, the Peumo, is an evergreen tree that grows in Chile and Argentina from 33 to 40° southern latitude. It can live both in wet and as in dry conditions. Its distribution can reach up to 1500 meters (5000 ft) above sea level. It measures up to 20 meters (65 ft) height and one meter diameter, with cracked gray bark. An associate tree is the endangered Chilean Wine Palm, Jubaea chilensis, which species prehistorically had a much wider range.

Delicious Fruit - Pequi (Caryocar brasiliense)

Caryocar brasiliense, known as Pequi or "souari nut", like its congeners, is an edible fruit popular in some areas of Brazil, especially in Brazil's center-west region.

he pequi tree grows up to 10 m (30 ft) tall. It is common in central Brazilian cerrado habitat from southern Pará to Paraná and northern Paraguay. Its leaves are large, tough, hairy and palmate, with three leaflets each. Unlike most other cerrado trees, it bears flowers in the dry winter months, approximately July to September. The yellowish-white flowers are hermaphroditic and bear many stamens; they somewhat resemble a huge pale St John's Wort flower (a distant relative among the Malpighiales). There are often two dozen or more flowers per inflorescence.

 

Delicious Fruit - Pawpaw (Asimina triloba)

Asimina triloba, the pawpaw, paw paw, paw-paw, or common pawpaw, is a species of Asimina (the pawpaw genus) in the same plant family (the Annonaceae) as the custard-apple, cherimoya, sweetsop, ylang-ylang and soursop. The pawpaw is native to the Eastern, Southern, and Midwestern United States and adjacent southernmost Ontario, Canada, from New York west to eastern Nebraska, and south to northern Florida and eastern Texas. The pawpaw is a patch-forming (clonal) understory tree found in well-drained, deep, fertile bottom-land and hilly upland habitat, with large, simple leaves and large fruits, the largest edible fruit indigenous to the United States.

 

Delicious Fruit - Rose hip

The rose hip, or rose haw, is the fruit of the rose plant, that typically is red-to-orange, but ranges from dark purple to black in some species. Rose hips begin to form in spring, and ripen in late summer through autumn.

Rose hips are used for herbal tea, jam, jelly, syrup, soup, beverages, pies, bread, wine, and marmalade. They can also be eaten raw, like a berry, if care is used to avoid the hairs inside the fruit.

A few rose species are sometimes grown for the ornamental value of their hips, such as Rosa moyesii, which has prominent large red bottle-shaped fruits.

Delicious Fruit - Maclura pomifera

Maclura pomifera, commonly called Osage-orange, hedge-apple, Horse-apple, Bois D'Arc, Bodark, or Bodock is a small deciduous tree or large shrub, typically growing to 8–15 metres (26–49 ft) tall. It is dioecious, with male and female flowers on different plants. The fruit, a multiple fruit, is roughly spherical, but bumpy, and 7–15 cm in diameter. It is filled with a sticky white latex sap. In fall, its color turns a bright yellow-green. It is not closely related to the citrus fruit called an orange: Maclura belongs to the mulberry family, Moraceae, while oranges belong to the family Rutaceae.

Maclura is closely related to the genus Cudrania, and hybrids between the two genera have been produced. In fact, some botanists recognize a more broadly defined Maclura that includes species previously included in Cudrania and other genera of Moraceae.

Osajin and Pomiferin are flavonoid pigments present in the wood and fruit, comprising about 10% of the fruit's dry weight. The plant also contains the flavonol morin.

It was once thought that placing an Osage orange under the bed would repel spiders and insects. This practice has declined with the rise of synthetic insecticides. However, scientific studies have found that extracts of Osage orange do repel several insect species, in some studies just as well as the widely-used synthetic insecticide DEET.

Delicious Fruit - Boysenberry

A boysenberry is a cross between a European Raspberry (Rubus idaeus), a Common Blackberry (Rubus fruticosus), and a Loganberry (Rubus × loganobaccus).
It is a large (8.0 g/0.28 oz) aggregate fruit, with large seeds and a deep maroon color, which changes to the typical boysenberry color when the fruit is cooked and made into jam and pies.

In the late 1920s, George M. Darrow of the USDA began tracking down reports of a large, reddish-purple berry that had been grown on the northern California farm of a man named Rudolph Boysen. Darrow enlisted the help of Walter Knott, a Southern California farmer who was known as a berry expert. Knott had never heard of the new berry, but he agreed to help Darrow in his search.

Darrow and Knott learned that Boysen had abandoned his growing experiments several years earlier and sold his farm. Undaunted by this news, Darrow and Knott headed out to Boysen's old farm, on which they found several frail vines surviving in a field choked with weeds. They transplanted the vines to Knott's farm in Buena Park, California, where he nurtured them back to fruit-bearing health. Walter Knott was the first to commercially cultivate the berry in southern California. He began selling the berries at his farm stand in 1932 and soon noticed that people kept returning to buy the large, tasty berries. When asked what they were called, Knott said, "Boysenberries," after their originator. His family's small restaurant and pie business eventually grew into Knott's Berry Farm. As the berry's popularity grew, Mrs. Knott began making preserves, which ultimately made Knott's Berry Farm famous.

 

Delicious Fruit - Pumpkin

A pumpkin is a gourd-like squash of the genus Cucurbita and the family Cucurbitaceae (which also includes gourds). It commonly refers to cultivars of any one of the species Cucurbita pepo, Cucurbita mixta, Cucurbita maxima, and Cucurbita moschata, and is native to North America. They typically have a thick, orange or yellow shell, creased from the stem to the bottom, containing the seeds and pulp. Pumpkins are widely grown for commercial use, and are used both in food and recreation. Pumpkin pie, for instance, is a traditional part of Thanksgiving meals in the United States, and pumpkins are frequently carved as decorations around Halloween. A pumpkin that has a little face carved in it and hollowed out and decorated with candles inside is known as a jack o'lantern; these are often used at Halloween, for example, to decorate windows.

In Australian English, the name 'pumpkin' generally refers to the broader category called winter squash in North America.