9 Super Fast Growing Fruit Trees (From Personal Experience in QLD)

Don’t want to wait for 10 years for your first harvest? Check out my favourite fast growing fruit trees for warm climates! From personal experience I can tell you that it is very possible to get a bumper crop in months, not years, from these trees. 

This article will focus on the trees that are the fastest to fruit, not necessarily the fastest to grow. In the end, we all want the fruit – who cares how big it is when it crops? There are other trees that are much faster in the growth department. However, they are slower to fruit. I have seen amazing growth in my chocolate pudding fruit, avocado trees, and mangoes – but they are yet to get a move on.

1. Acerola Cherry (Malpighia emarginata)

I’m starting the list with the Acerola Cherry as ‘least’ favourite. This is mainly because the fruit can be extremely sour! The kids and I love browsing the gardens, snacking on various fruits as we go. We usually take a tiny bite of the Acerola Cherry because of its incredibly high vitamin C content, but it isn’t our favourite flavour. Especially after devouring a delicious homegrown banana!

I should note that, when you find a fully ripe berry, they are distinctly less sour, almost sweet. Try and find one that is a deep, glossy red. We find it hard to get it just right – the ants know when they’re ripe before we do. 

The Acerola Cherry does deserve a place in your garden though. It can produce multiple crops per year, and they’re big crops too. Last year, we harvested over 10kg of fruit from our tree and it is only 4 years old. It started cropping months after planting – and hasn’t looked back. Ours is in a shady position and loving it. I believe that if you planted it in a sunny position, you could achieve crops of up to 20kg per tree. It makes a fantastic jam.

One study showed that Acerola fruit has an “exorbitant” amount of vitamin C – 50 to 100 times more than a lemon or an orange. The study called ‘Acerola, an Untapped Functional Superfood’, mentioned:

“The fruit contains an exorbitant amount of ascorbic acid in the range of 1500–4500 mg/100 g, which is around 50–100 times than that of orange or lemon. Having a reservoir of phytonutrients, the fruit exhibits high antioxidant capacity and several interesting biofunctional properties like skin whitening effect, anti-aging and multidrug resistant reversal activity.”

It’s worth eating one every day!

2. Sandpaper Fig (Ficus Opposita)

The Sandpaper Fig is fast. Really fast. When I bought it from Daley’s nursery, it was already in fruit! It hasn’t stopped fruiting since. I grow mine in the food forest, and it is one of the chickens’ favourite fruits. It’s very entertaining watching them jump up to grab a bite!

The Sandpaper Fig is very interesting plant. It is messy! Despite all my pruning efforts (it’s great for chop and drop), it rambles around. I’ve decided to just let it do its thing. It’s happy in the shade of the bigger trees and although it isn’t pretty, it’s always a crowd favourite. Mainly because of its leaf texture – it really is like sandpaper! 

Birds love the fruits, and it is a host plant for the Purple Moonbeam butterfly, which was Brisbane Big Butterfly Count’s butterfly of the month in March 2024. It grows around 3m tall, although some sources say up to 6m. It’s very easy to prune so you don’t have to let it get that tall. Again, the fruit doesn’t taste like a juicy ripe mulberry, but they are quite pleasant. You can also eat the leaves, and make rope from the stringy bark!

It is well worth reading this paper by Greg Calvert (originally published in “The Native Gardener”, Newsletter of SGAP Townsville Branch, March 1998.) Greg mentions the many uses of the Sandpaper Fig, showing us that it deserves a nice spot in your garden or food forest. They were traditionally used to polish wood but also as a cure for ringworm, as fire sticks, and as string!

3. Galangal (Alpinia galanga)

As I’m sitting here in my gorgeous office, staring out of my giant window overlooking the front yard, I’m contemplating the amazing Galangal ginger. This is one of my favourites. I do apologise. It isn’t technically a fruit tree! However, considering its uses and yumminess, on the list it went! Learn how to grow galangal ginger in my blog post!

The Galangal is worth growing for its appearance alone. It grows to around 3m tall with tropical, lush green stems and big leaves. The flowers are lovely – I’ve included a video above and photo below.

Check out more galangal photos in the Alpinia galanga gallery!

Another thing I love is that this plant handles whatever you throw at it. In the wet season, you usually get a few plants that give up the ghost. They just can’t handle the sodden ground for weeks on end. Usually, they’re okay while it rains, but when it stops, they keel over. There’s not much you can do about it either, except grow on mounds, but that makes it hard to keep them wet during the dry season!

Anyway. Moving on.

The Galangal doesn’t fuss or whine. It just grows. Wet, dry, shade, sun – it truly doesn’t care. I have one in the sun and one in almost full shade. The one in full shade is a little shorter, but still a good 2m tall. Let’s talk about the roots now, the tasty part of Galangal. 

The main part I use for cooking (and health benefits!) is the rhizomes, the underground roots. I use it in a similar way to ginger. Throw it in all your asian dishes, make curry paste, chuck it in soups and stews, everywhere! It has a fairly strong, lemony flavour (smell it! It smells incredible) that I find goes well in most things. I love making water kefir and often use galangal root instead of ginger root as the galangal grows so much better and faster than ginger. 

4. PawPaw (Carica Papaya)

Oh the pawpaw! Funny story. When my girls were little, my husband and I were talking about the paw paw tree. The girls overheard us and thought we said ‘poor paw’ and immediately became sad for the dog. “What’s wrong with his paws, mummy?” they asked. Since then, the pawpaw has been called the ‘poor paw’. 

This is my mother-in-laws favourite fruit. It’s quite possibly an acquired taste, but she loves it sprinkled with lime juice. I’m not its biggest fan, but I love how fast it grows! You’ll get fruit in months, and plenty of seeds to grow new trees. It’ll happily self seed if you throw a fruit in the garden, or even in a big pot!

5. Saba Nut/Malabar Chestnut (Pachira glabra)

I’ve included the saba nut, or Malabar chestnut as it’s often called, because it’s unusual to see a fast-growing nut tree. The saba nut is exactly that. It grows like a weed but doesn’t look like one. I love everything about it. Its shape, like a big umbrella. Its hardiness – it’ll soldier through floods, droughts, heat waves, even some frost (not that we get any here).

The flowers are gorgeous, huge big frilly things. It produces big capsules that have up to 15 seeds inside. These seeds easily self-seed, and they’re delicious! I eat them raw, straight from the capsule. You can also roast them with a bit of oil and salt; they’re divine. I liken them to an almond-macadamia-cashew. A must-grow!

6. Passionfruit (Passiflora sp.)

Goodness, the passionfruit! Besides it having some of the most beautiful flowers of all the plants in the garden, the fruit is delicious to boot. It’ll cover a fence (or chook pen in my case) in months and starts producing fruit immediately.

Once it gets going, you’ll never be without passionfruit again. And you’ll probably have enough to share with the chickens (and the birds, possums, wallabies…. Everyone loves passionfruit!)

Passionfruit loves full sun – it can’t get enough of it even during the hottest days in summer. It might need a drink now and then when it gets really dry or when it’s not fully established yet. Mine has claimed the entire chook pen area. I bet it’s loving the free fertiliser it gets to continually suck up. It’s of mutual benefit, though. The chooks love the shade and insulation it gives their home, too. 

7. Mulberry (Morus sp.)

I grow around 10 mulberry trees. There seem to be three distinct different varieties or types. I have small-leaved varieties, big-leaved varieties, and one White Shahtoot. They all grow incredibly fast, but the small-leaved ones are the winners in the fruit department. Within a year, we had enough to make six jars of syrup. I love the syrup in milk kefir and smoothies. It’s fantastic over ice cream, too! 

The differences in leaf size, harvest quantity, and fruiting time could be due to their positions, of course, but I’ve focussed my propagation efforts on the small-leaved ones. They’re incredibly easy to propagate, by the way. Simply cut a nice-sized piece of stem and stick it in the ground. Free mulberry trees!

8. Banana (Musa sp.)

We grow enough bananas to share with the birds and wildlife. We didn’t intentionally do this, but since bananas are so easy to propagate and we’ve got plenty of room, we figured – why not? Do make sure you get your bananas from a reputable nursery. You don’t need a permit to grow bananas in Queensland, as long as you buy them from a QBAN (Quality Approved Banana Nursery) nursery.

My bananas are tissue-cultured varieties, most coming from Backyard Bananas (Blue Sky Tissue Culture). They sadly don’t seem to be in business anymore. Daley’s has a good range these days, so it’s worth checking them out if you’d like to buy some bananas for your backyard.

Check out these cheeky honeyeaters snacking on our homegrown bunch of bananas:

I grow Goldfinger, dwarf Ducasse, dwarf Red Dacca, and I had a Super Dwarf for a while. The Super Dwarf didn’t make it through the dry season, unfortunately – I most likely didn’t keep it moist enough, or it wasn’t in the right spot. Considering how easy the others are to grow, I definitely went wrong somewhere.

My favourite out of these is the dwarf Ducasse – what a legend! They are always in fruit, or in the process of producing another bunch. The bananas are heavenly. We eat them fresh, chuck them in the kids’ lunchboxes, and I love leaving a bunch or 2 to ripen on the tree.

Birds adore them (watch the honeyeaters go crazy and call all their friends over for a banana party!) and it is the best thing ever to snack on while you’re gardening. And they’re a kids’ favourite, of course!

9. Panama Berry (Muntingia calabura)

We have arrived at my favourite fast growing fruit tree, the panama berry. I started with just one in the food forest as it is a great pioneer tree. I’m not sure if it has that reputation, but if it hasn’t, it should! I now have at least five. I’ve never seen anything grow as fast in the tropics as the Panama berry. Within months, it stood 2m tall with a head full of berries.

Something I didn’t know when I started growing it – horses and cattle love it! Don’t grow it in the paddock, or protect it with a decent fence as the animals will seek it out and devour it. Our old lady (a 27-year old horse) will stand under this tree for hours, reaching up and chomping on the leaves. Despite having hardly any teeth, she still manages to keep the tree in a nice umbrella shape – no branches or leaves below horse-head-height.

Besides its super sonic growing speed, the fruits are tasty too. The skin can be a bit chewy, but you can squirt the inside out, which is sweet and yummy. Chickens love it too – they’re always scratching around for the fallen fruit.

The tree itself is very decorative as well. It grows in a nice umbrella shape (especially if you have a horse-pruner) with soft foliage and beautiful white flowers. Interestingly, the fruits grow beneath the branches. You often can’t spot them from above so you need to lift the branches to see the fruit. 

What’s your favourite fast growing fruit tree? I’m always looking for the next tree to plant so please leave your comments and suggestions in the comment box below!