Breadfruit
Artocarpus altilis
Grown for a fruit that is cooked rather than eaten raw, and the real limit under glass is headroom.
- Type
- Fruit · Perennial
- Botanical family
- Mixed / other
- Foliage color
- Green
- Flower color
- Green
- Sunlight
- Full light under glass, and more headroom than most.
- Watering
- Steady moisture at the roots and humid air around it.
- Feeding
- A balanced feed, monthly, through the growing season.
- Frost tolerant
- Yes
- Flowering
- February
- Pruning
- Prune only to keep it inside the greenhouse.
- Overwintering
- It will not survive below 15°C — heated glass is not optional.
- Mar–Mar Flowering
- Mar–Jul Fruit Set
- Jul–Dec Harvest
- Jan–Mar Harvest
- Plant spacing
- 44 ft 3 in
- In-row spacing
- 44 ft 3 in
- Between rows
- 49 ft 3 in
- Square-foot density
- Not suited to SFG
- Root system
- Woody, shallow and far-reaching
- Working depth
- 12–24 in
- Can reach
- 4 ft down where the soil allows
- Spread
- 39–59 ft across, about 2–3× the width of the plant
Almost all of a tree’s roots are in the top two feet of soil, where the air is, and they run out well past the branch tips. The deep taproot most people picture belongs to the seedling; the tree grows out of it and spends the rest of its life spreading sideways instead.
It throws suckers from surface roots well out from the trunk, which is how it is propagated and how a single tree becomes a grove if nobody is watching.
The habit is Breadfruit’s own; the figures are what that habit usually comes to at this size, not a measurement of this species. Roots follow the soil either way: a compacted pan, a high water table or heavy clay stops them well short of any of it, and deep open ground lets them go further.
- Mealybugs Mealybugs packed into leaf axils and along the stems
- Scale insects Scale insects on stems and the undersides of leaves
- Spider mites Red spider mite in the dry warmth of a heated greenhouse
- Leaf spot Leaf spot when the air stays humid
- Root & crown rot Root rot where the watering is overdone
Beneficial predators that hunt this plant's pests — grow their favourite flowers nearby to recruit them. companion plant
- Ladybird (lady beetle) Coccinellidae
The gardener’s favorite ally: adults and their alligator-shaped larvae each eat thousands of aphids, plus scale, mealybugs, and other soft-bodied sap-suckers. Grow flat, open flowers for the adults and never spray a colony that ladybird larvae are already working.
- Green lacewing Chrysoperla carnea
Its bristly larvae — "aphid lions" — impale aphids, mealybugs, thrips, and mite colonies, eating hundreds a week. Adults feed on nectar and pollen from small open flowers and overwinter in hollow stems left standing.
- Hoverfly Syrphidae
Bee-mimicking flies whose legless larvae graze aphid colonies clean while the adults pollinate. A ribbon of shallow, nectar-rich flowers kept in bloom all season recruits wave after wave of them.
- Big-eyed bug Geocoris spp.Hunts Spider mites
A stubby 3 mm bug with enormous wrap-around eyes, working the soil surface and the low foliage for aphids, mites, thrips and insect eggs. It is the main natural check on chinch bugs in a lawn and it is killed outright by insecticide.
- Minute pirate bug Orius spp.Hunts Spider mites
A pinhead-sized true bug that is the best natural check on thrips, and happily spears aphids, mites, and insect eggs too. It needs pollen when prey is scarce, so keep something flowering nearby.
- Predatory mites Phytoseiulus & AmblyseiusHunts Spider mites
Fast orange mites that hunt spider mites egg-by-egg, and cousins that clear thrips and fungus-gnat larvae. Sold as a biological control for greenhouses; outdoors they follow humidity — mist and mulch, don’t dust with sulfur.
- Rove beetle StaphylinidaeHunts Spider mites
Slim, quick beetles with short wing cases that hunt in soil and litter, taking root-fly eggs and larvae, fungus-gnat larvae, and mites. Mulch and undisturbed ground keep them resident year-round.
The Cottage Garden Companion — the gardener's herbarium at cottagegardencompanion.com