A recent blog post by the World Agroforestry Centre described their idea of a phenologically varied “fruit tree portfolio” to provide nutrition throughout the year. In Machakos, Kenya, where the portfolio is being tested out, these would be the species involved, a mixture of the local and the exotic:
A nice idea, and it reminded me that you can also do something similar by exploiting within-species diversity in seasonality. The example I know best comes from Diane Ragone’s work on breadfruit. This is from a presentation she gave recently at USAID.
Planting multiple varieties carefully chosen from each of these different groups means you can count on having some fruit throughout the year, most years. Great to have diversity at multiple levels to play around with.