Why picking your own fruit in Antigua is worth doing
Picking your own fruit in Antigua is worth doing because almost none of us have ever tasted fruit at its real peak, the few hours after it leaves the branch. Supermarket fruit is bred and picked to survive shipping, not to taste of anything, so a custard apple off Lionel’s tree is a different food entirely from one in a plastic punnet.
It also reconnects you with where food comes from, which most travellers have lost completely. Reaching up, smelling a sugar apple, learning that ripe is a scent and not a date sticker, is the kind of small re-education a food garden stay hands you and a resort buffet never will. So here is the whole garden, what each thing is, how to spot it ripe, and what to do with it.
What fruit can you eat fresh off the tree?
The fresh eating fruit is the heart of the garden, the trees you can pick and bite into the same minute. These are the ones guests reach for first.
Custard apple
A creamy, sweet fruit you tear open and eat raw, picked when it starts to turn pinkish. Mr Lionel split one with his hands. “Inside is white and the seeds are black, and I will just throw the seeds around, and the seeds may produce another fruit plant.” My reaction on camera was “it’s like cookie dough, or cake batter,” and that it was the first time I had ever seen one. His note: “It’s natural. This plant was grown without any additives to the earth. Nature produces this plant.”
Sugar apple
Sweeter than the custard apple and its close cousin, ready when the segments open like an unclenching fist. “The sugar apple is sweeter than the custard apple, just naturally sweet,” he said. “When this is ready, the eyes will be opened. The spaces between each of these we call figs.” Many were already black, and he did not mind. “All the black ones, the birds got them before. We’re in the same environment and they have to eat too.”
Soursop
The big, prized, spiky green superfruit, tart and creamy, good eaten, juiced, or with the leaves in tea. “This is the super fruit plant, soursop,” he said. “This is one of the first plant we planted here, and it’s still alive. We’re here now twenty years.” On the health claims, “they say it does something to cancer cells, that’s what they say,” which is folk belief rather than medical fact, but the fruit and the twenty year old tree are real.
Guava
Sweet and fragrant, two trees here, picked soft, with the leaf steeped as tea. It was one of several leaves Lionel uses for his own brews, alongside the fruit you eat straight off the branch.
What is the golden apple, the fruit with a hundred names?
The golden apple is a tart-to-sweet Caribbean fruit, called June plum in Jamaica and ambarella elsewhere, that gives you two different drinks off one tree. On the tour I said, “golden apple is a Caribbean thing, right, you said it’s in Jamaica.” Lionel: “The Jamaicans call it June plum, but we call it golden apple. When it’s ripe, it’s yellow.” If you grew up in Europe you have likely never seen it.
Then the drinks. “If the fruit is green but full, you take the flesh of the seed, blend it, and that flesh will be green and give you green juice. The yellow one will be sweeter, so it takes less sugar.” At Antiguan functions, “they have two types of golden apple drink, one green and one yellow.” It is the kind of single tree that earns Lamblion its place among the best eco stays in Antigua.
How many types of banana grow at Lamblion?
Five different bananas grow at Lamblion, some eaten raw and some fried or boiled. “I have five different species of bananas,” Lionel said. “I eat the banana, the finger rose and the purple one just normal. The other two, the bogeyman and the plantain, we fry or boil.” The finger rose he rated highest, “that’s sweet.”
And one plant is all you ever need. “If you plant one banana plant, you can eventually have a whole plantation,” because each throws out suckers you replant. That endless, self replicating abundance is exactly the logic behind the self sufficient garden stays we feature across the Caribbean.
Which fruit trees take patience to grow?
Some of the garden rewards patience rather than speed, the trees that fruit slowly or only in season. They are the ones Lionel is proudest of.
Mango
Several varieties, some grafted, some seed grown, the fruit “big like my palm.” “You can’t plant a mango seed and get a Julie mango,” he said, because the famous Julie is grafted. He keeps both, and likes a tree that fruits twice, because an out of season crop “you may be able to sell at a premium.”
Avocado
Rich and thick fleshed, flowering now for fruit in three to four months, and not every year. “The male part of the flower comes out in the night to pollinate, and some comes out in the morning for different types,” he said, then, plainly, “I don’t know what type I have, because I just wait for the fruit and enjoy the fruit.”
Sweet lemon
A citrus mild enough to eat whole, behind the golden apple tree. “I call it a sweet lemon tree because I can eat the lemons like how I eat an orange.”
Coconut
Water when green, oil and meat when dry, and nothing wasted. “Opening a coconut is an art,” he said, before proving it with a machete on a green one and a dry one. A man from Antigua who moved to Canada “completely forgot how to do it.” The dry nuts give oil and grated coconut, and “we take the husks and make artwork, you could make a bird.”
What are the smaller treasures in the garden?
Beyond the headline trees, the garden is full of smaller, constant croppers most visitors have never tasted.
Gooseberry, the local raspberry
Bearing almost continuously, three or four times a year, and made into a drink. “We also call them raspberry, that’s our local raspberry, not the American type.”
Pineapple
Grown from the cut tops. “I got those from the top of the pineapple, I cut the top off.” On one that looked small, “you can’t judge a pineapple, just like you have people that are old but short.”
Cherry
A Surinamese cherry and the traditional one he grew up with. “The kids love it because it’s a red cherry, my granddaughters love to come and pick them.”
Pigeon peas and papaya
Pigeon peas that give more the more you take, “the more you pick them, the more they bear,” and he is still hunting a lost purple variety for rice and peas. Papaya planted by hand, “papaya being male, you can have a papaya plant and just be all male flowers.”
What herbs and greens can you pick at Lamblion?
The herbs and greens are mostly Lorylin’s, and she planted every bed: celery, chives, two kinds of parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme and anise, with a running spinach, kale, lettuce and arugula she keeps “because it’s low maintenance.”
Mr Lionel keeps his own tea patch, “because my wife doesn’t take as much care of the things I use for my tea.” There is French thyme, “some people know it as oregano,” basil, and the one he drinks daily. “This is the famous lemongrass, we call it fever grass. Our old folks used to think it will help relieve your fever.” The full story of the teas and bush medicine is in the tea garden at Lamblion, and what to cook with it all is in what to eat in Antigua, straight from the garden.
Why does he grow all of it, and let guests pick?
Lionel grows all of it because, to him, a productive piece of ground is the truest wealth there is. I told him on the tour he was a rich man, because “with the peas, the veggies, the herbs, the fruits, you’re actually complete, you can’t go hungry here.” He answered with what a farmer once told him.
“The poor ground is better than a rich home. The ground can always produce some kind of food for you to eat. But if you have a rich home and you have no food in the home, you’ll die for hunger.” That is the philosophy that lets guests eat from his trees, and it is why Lamblion sits among the black owned eco stays we champion across the Caribbean and the certified sustainable stays in the region.
Come and pick it yourself. See the full verified facts, map and gallery on the Lamblion’s accommodation details, read why you pick your own breakfast here, and weigh it against the best eco stays in Antigua before you book.