Plant and Grow Foxtail Palm

This species is commonly grown in Hawai’i for palm heart, but the fruit is far more valuable than the heart in terms of flavor, nutrition, culinary usefulness, etc. The fruit selections by pioneering botanical researcher John Mood in Hawai’i are dramatically superior to typical Bactris (higher oil content, less fibrous, thin skin), so it’s important to understand the genetic variation of this species and the source of your seeds. Ideally you should taste the fruits and start the seeds yourself to feel confident you’re growing something worthwhile and not random junk genetics. Even if you can’t acquire the best Mood genetics you might still be able to grow very tasty and good quality fruit. Extremely delicious fruits, like oily sweet potato. Clumping palm. Most of the Bactris gasipaes in Hawai’i are thornless, regardless of fruit quality, but a small percentage of seedlings will revert to thorns and this will be noticeable when the plants are very young, so thorny plants can simply be killed immediately to keep the gene pool strong and avoid all the injury/death/etc that the terrifying thorns might cause.

This species is very popular as an everyday food in tropical America and there are many names in many languages. We use “pejibaye” because it’s one of the most common names. The bizarre name “peach palm” is sometimes used in English, but we don’t understand where this name came from because the fruit is not remotely similar to peach in any way.