Lychees

The queen of subtropical fruits! Lychee trees are temperamental fruiters, and require a sequence of winter weather that induces a period of quiescence necessary for flowering and fruiting. Some years there is a bumper crop, and others hardly a bloom. And even in good years, the season lasts only a couple of months around the start of summer. The peak of a good lychee seasons is a special time!

A high-quality lychee fruit is one of nature’s masterpieces— sweet, but not overly sweet, with just a hint of acidity to balance it. And a unique flavor. There are only a few varieties commonly cultivated in Florida, with similar but distinguishable flavors. For the Sweetheart variety, similar to (and some say the same as) Hak Ip, the majority of its fruit have slender “chicken tongue” seeds, giving more of the tasty fruit flesh to enjoy.

The fruit should be ready to eat when you buy it, and has a relatively short shelf life, a few days in the refrigerator. It can be carefully peeled, but generally you just nick the skin with your teeth, squeeze out the juicy, translucent interior, and eject the single seed.

Lychee trees are beautiful evergreens with a spreading habit that can become quite large if allowed to (as commercial growers, we don’t). Obtain a named variety rather than a seedling. Lychees do best in moist, acidic soils, and like most fruit trees should be on mounds so as not to sit in standing water.

Our business name is taken from a rare local variety, the Sweet Song lychee. Raised from a seed brought back from China by L. G. Allen, it was propagated by Wayne Clifton. We might have the world’s largest collection— three trees! Wayne’s Sweet Song lychee tree is shown here.

By the way, many of us pronounce the name LEE-chee, but LIE-chee is perhaps more correct. By any name, it’s a fabulous fruit.

At SweetSong Groves, we have ten lychee trees: our three Sweet Song trees (NW-A-2, NW-A-9, NW-H-2), Sweetheart (SW-C-2), Hak Ip (NW-D-5), Ohia (NW-B-1), Emperor (NW-A-3), Kwai Mai Pink (also known as Bosworth 3) (NW-B-2), No Mai Tsze (NW-D-2), and Bosworth (NW-B-2). Let’s hope for good lychee weather!