Cheese plant food will not kill you

9:38am Wednesday 7th May 2008

My cheese plant, which originally belonged to my daughter in her student days in the early very 1990s, and started its life in a pot in student digs in Swansea, has been producing flowers and fruit for the last three years.

It runs riot in my scruffy second hand greenhouse, heated by an old fan heater, and has made a bid for freedom on several occasions, shattering panes of glass in the process. Its roots run around the floor under the staging and it really does thrive on neglect.

Providing these plants are given heat, humidity and good light, after many years they will readily flower and fruit. The fruit is edible and delicious, tasting and smelling of sweet pineapple.

It must only be eaten when ripe when it no longer contains poisonous oxalic acid but the fruit very obligingly starts to peal back its own outer green casing when ripe, to reveal the delicious inner core of edible fruit.

And yes, I did eat some and I'm still alive to tell the tale!

Anna C Kicks, Higher Roscarrack, Budock