Bush Tucker Time- The Emu Plum
Bush Tucker Time- The Emu Plum
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I’ve been searching for these guys for about five years and we finally found them on the Northcliffe to Walpole tour!! We saw heaps of purple emu scats (poos) with big seeds in them and I had no idea what they were from so we kept an eye out and came across a bonanza crop of emu plums!
Emu Plums (Podocarpus drouynianus) are the largest edible fruits in Australia’s South West. Emus eat the fruit, hence the name. The plums must be stimulated to flower and fruit after fire because I’ve seen the plant a lot but never the fruit, until we walked through the section of the Bibbulmun Track that was burnt in the huge fires of Jan 2015.
Yum, you may ask? Well not really, the purple fruit doesn’t taste like much but it’s not unpleasant. The pink/yellow bit dangling off the end is the seed. The bit you eat is apparently not a fruit at all but the fleshy stalk of the true fruit (who knows where that is).
Bon Appétit,
Emily
