One US$ 5,000 tree from China plus 19 years of patience and hard work is what Tibby Dixon has put into having the first seedless lychees growing in Australia. The North Queensland farmer has left the traditional path of growing trees solely for fruit, and develops lychee varieties, selling young plants to other farmers to grow.
But the pick of the crop might just be a seedless variety he has been propagating from a single tree imported from China.
"The cultivar [variety] itself is a medium-sized fruit, [with] no seed, [and] very flavoursome," Mr Dixon said. "It's very different to all the other cultivars we have."
Dixon, who is based at Sarina Beach near Mackay, has harvested only a few kilograms of the seedless fruit from the trees this year, and has preferred to focus on growing the trees to establish more plants. He has developed multiple lychee varieties, and the process involves both selective breeding and cross-pollinating flowers by hand over several generations of trees.
"First of all you have to start off with a really good cultivar, and then you get on with it and you keep cross-pollinating it," he said. "[Then] hopefully somewhere down the line you can actually get something with a small seed, and from there you cross-pollinate again. By chance you might end up with a seedless lychee."
Cross-pollination is done by collecting pollen from the male part of a lychee flower, which is then transferred by hand to the female part of the flower on a different variety. The job is finicky, and the pollen is sometimes stored until the flowers are considered more receptive.
Lychees not yet on the supermarket shelves
The variety is still in the early stages of development and is yet to be planted on a commercial scale. Mr Dixon is in the process of growing a crop of trees which will one day bear fruit on Australian farms. "Within a couple of years we should have enough to sell out in commercial numbers," he told abc.net.au.
Dixon's trial varieties are grown until a fruit-bearing age, and then the crop is trialled to ensure consistent productivity. "It's been a long, hard slog.”