Shas­tri Boodan

Free­lance Con­trib­u­tor

The dream of grow­ing ap­ples un­der the Caribbean sun is quick­ly tak­ing root in T&T.

More than 1,000 peo­ple have al­ready ex­pressed in­ter­est in plant­i­ng the trop­i­cal ap­ple va­ri­ety de­vel­oped by the late Kenyan in­no­va­tor HP Wambugu—an idea that once seemed im­pos­si­ble for this re­gion.

His daugh­ter, Kate Wambugu, now car­ries the torch. On a re­cent vis­it to the Ap­ple Tree Re­search Cen­tre Caribbean in Long­denville, she walked among the young trees with qui­et con­fi­dence, shar­ing sto­ries of her fa­ther’s break­through in 1985.

She al­so met with more than 200 farm­ers in Gran Cou­va, many ea­ger to carve out their place in what could be­come a new fron­tier crop for T&T.

“Some want to plant acres, oth­ers just a few trees in their back­yards,” Wambugu said, not­ing that in­ter­est is com­ing from both sea­soned farm­ers and first-time grow­ers. Of the 11 va­ri­eties her fam­i­ly de­vel­oped, four have shown re­mark­able per­for­mance in trop­i­cal cli­mates, al­ready thriv­ing across 37 coun­tries.

The promise is en­tic­ing: each tree can yield over 300 ap­ples a year, live for more than 80 years, and pro­duce fruit with a no­tably longer shelf life than many con­ven­tion­al va­ri­eties.

And for those plant­i­ng now, the wait won’t be long. Trees es­tab­lished in Ja­maica and T&T are ex­pect­ed to be­gin bear­ing fruit by mid-2026. The plants flower at around nine months, with fruit ma­tur­ing short­ly af­ter.

Wambugu said she in­tends to pro­vide tech­ni­cal sup­port to help lo­cal grow­ers es­tab­lish a sol­id, sus­tain­able in­dus­try.

“The po­ten­tial here is huge,” she said.

For Bon­ney Ab­dul, own­er of the Ap­ple Tree Re­search Cen­tre Caribbean, the jour­ney has been far from easy—but he be­lieves the pay­off is near. His op­er­a­tion has been en­tire­ly self-fund­ed, a sac­ri­fice that in­clud­ed sell­ing seedlings to keep his work­ers paid. When he ap­proached fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions for sup­port, he said he was laughed out of the room.

Still, Ab­dul re­mains un­de­terred. Stand­ing among rows of young ap­ple trees, he said the scep­ti­cism won’t last much longer.

“Once peo­ple see these trees bear­ing, more farm­ers are go­ing to come on board,” he said, cer­tain that the or­chard’s first fruits will not on­ly prove the doubters wrong but al­so open the door to a brand-new agri­cul­tur­al fu­ture for T&T.