Monstera plants grow pretty much all over the world where it’s warm and humid enough, though native to tropical forests of Mexico and Panama.

When we visited Madeira, we bought the Monstera deliciosa fruit on the market as it’s an interesting fruit and we wanted to try it. It wasn’t ripe yet, so we took it home with us. We also bought some for our friends – best gift you can bring back from a trip – no junk souvenirs. 🙂

The fruits ripened in two weeks. Monstera fruit looks like a green ear of maize covered with hexagonal scales. Before eating, the fruit must be ripe, you can tell that when the scales or platelets fall off, also releasing a strong and sweet scent. The flesh is similar to pineapple, not just in taste and smell, but also in texture. It can be torn or cut away from the core. The black irritant fibres can be swept off by applying a little citrus juice. The smell as well as taste can be compared to a combination of pineapples and bananas. Delicious, tropical. It is also called banana-pineapple fruit.

When we ate it, we noticed green seeds inside the fruit, located close to the core part of the »cone«. Seeds are up to 1 cm long and about 0,5 cm wide. If they’re present in the fruit, they can’t be missed. I collected 11 seeds from two fruits. I dried them for a day and put in regular indoor plant soil. I covered the seeds very lightly, put them less than 1 cm deep.

Note: fruits of plants of the Araceae (Arum family) often contain raphides and trichosclereids – needle-like structures of calcium oxalate. In M. deliciosa, unripe fruit contains these needle-like crystalline structures, which can cause irritation of the mouth. If eaten not completely ripe, it hurts the oral mucous membrane and one can end up with wounds across the mouth or even a larger scale immune reaction. Have you ever tried a piece of an unripe pineapple? Similar, only even more uncomfortable (I tried a very small unripe piece for means of research to confirm).

The fruit first shows signs of ripening by its bottommost scales becoming yellowed. As it ripens, the starch stored in the green fruit is converted to sugar, giving it its sweet flavor. This mechanism is comparable to how banana fruits or chestnuts ripen.

Also note: all parts of the plant, except for the ripe fruits, are poisonous. The unripe green fruits can irritate the throat and the latex of the leaves and vines can create rashes in the skin, because both contain potassium oxalate. That is the reason the fruits have to be consumed when the scales lift up. The leaves cause problems if chewed or are in contact with wounded skin. General symptoms of poisoning are immediate and painful with aphonia (loss of voice), blistering, hoarseness and irritation of the mouth.

Back to our seeds

The first seeds germinated after 3 months, others took another month.

Only 6 of them germinated. I replanted them the next spring, in april, each plant in its own pot. I read some instructions where it said it is good to cover the soil with Sphagnum sp. I checked all the florists and all they had were very large quantities of the moss, which I didn’t need. Sphagnum moss grows in our area, but I didn’t dare infect the soil with some randomly picked sphagnum from the local forest. So I let it grow without it and hoped for the best.

I watered once a week and fertilized every other week with about 100 ml of liquid fertilizer diluted in 1 l of aged water. I used the same kind of soil for all the pots and kept the pots in a similar, not too bright spot and watered them equally.

Only two plants survived the replanting once they outgrew their original pots. In another six months one more died. I don’t know exactly what went wrong, but I suspect the temperature in our apartment was to low – hardly above 20°C at most (the apartment we were living in was very cold, don’t get me started…). Reading many the instructions, they all say Monstera is very easy to grow, but none say they’re easy to propagate, neither do they say it’s complicated. In this case it also depended on how viable the seeds were, they probably didn’t all have the same fitness and durability since they were flown in and then stored in a fridge for a short while – when still in the fruit. Had I known there were seeds in the fruits, I would treat them more carefully with the seeds’ viability in mind.

Anyway, the one plant that survived is growing successfully. I keep to the same schedule – watering once a week and now fertilizing once a month or less. Replanting every spring to a larger pot while it grows. The young leaves don’t have the distinctive perforations yet, those grow later on a more mature plant.

Very important note: I brought the fruits onto another country knowing the plant isn’t an invasive species in our area. It can’t grow outdoors because of the climate. Otherwise I would never have done something like that. Always do your research of what you are bringing home with you and if the plant might be anywhere close to potentially invasive, don’t. Carrying an invasive or potentially invasive species is also illegal. Be very careful about this – for the sake of the nature’s health – our home’s health.

References:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monstera_deliciosa

https://www.blankees.com/house/plants/monstera.htm

 

Interesting info: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMYR0TicbL4