If you think candy should include more hurdles in order to enjoy it, like seeds and pith, then this is the fruit for you!
Meiwa Kumquats are not your average kumquat. First of all they are round instead of oval and they are much harder to find. I suppose you could stumble upon them easily if you had access to the ever popular Kumquat Festival in Dade City. This site gives tons of information about the festival such as no date, no location, and a whopping one out of four stars rating. BUT, it is a “fun packed family event that lasts for a day”. Oh – and did I mention it is completely dedicated to Kumquats? Yeah – that’s my kind of event. Where’s my party hat?
APPEARANCE Rating: 
Small, round, orange fruit with a good number of seeds.
AROMA Rating: 
Lightly orange and acidic.
TEXTURE Rating:
Firm, almost crunchy and a bit fibrous. Not particularly juicy.
TASTE Rating:
Nice complicated sweetness with bits of sour juice and a slight bitterness in the peel.
OVERALL Overall Rating:
I so desperately want to like kumquats. They are small. You can pop the whole thing in your mouth. They kind of taste like candy with a little splash of sour and bitter grown up flavor. But then there are the seeds. What kind of tiny little fruit that is so perfectly fit for snacking, dares to include 5 or 6 seeds in each bite! GAH! I will admit that this one is sweeter and far more interesting than the more common Nagami Kumquat, but still – the audacity! (Also this claims that Meiwas have very few seeds so maybe I just got a particularly defiant batch.)
| FRUIT Kumquat |
PEAK Winter |
PURCHASED Farmer’s Market |
| VARIETY Meiwa |
GROWN Rainbow, CA |
Yes indeed this Meiwa Kumquat is sweet and its meat is not much of juice. I just bought it from Mimosa Nursery in Anaheim,CA. It costs about $55 for 7 gallon tree. I had the Nagami Kumquat for 2 years now…and love it. Its yellow fruit makes my garden beautiful….I am sure that I will love the Meiwa much more. Good luck
Mike
I live in Texas and cannot find a source of kumquat trees that will send to Texas.
Seedless varieties exist, like the Nordmann.
Seedless varieties exist, like the Nordmann nugami.
Yeah Nick – I’ve had the Nordmann once and you are right – no seeds. But unfortunately the flavor didn’t really appeal to me. I only got to try one though – so who knows. I’m definitely hoping to stumble across some of those again where I can get at least a handful.
You will be greatly rewarded if you take about 10 seconds to cut if in half and flick out the seeds with a knife. They’re addicting!
FINALLY after several years of looking I stumbled on ONE Meiwa Kumquat tree at Lowes, here in Tampa, FL. ~ I had literally given up on finding one locally and was going to just settle for the common Negami….UNTIL I saw the label on this 4′ beauty which I gladly paid the $39 price! ~ (Still cant believe I finally found one!)
Loving the spring Roy. My only worry is triyng to keep up with all that’s happening with the garden and triyng to blog it all as well.A friend gave me some Kaffir Lime leaves on the weekend so I’m brewing a Cooper’s Mexican Cerveza with them in it.We’ll wait to see how it turns out. There seems to be an endless amount of things that we can do with citrus trees.