Jackfruit

Products:

• Food: Pulp of ripe fruit is edible. It can be eaten fresh or made into various local delicacies like jam, jelly and paste, chutney or preserved as candy by drying or mixing with sugar, honey or syrup. It can also be cooked as vegetables, pickled or canned in brine or curry. The seeds are eaten after boiling or roasting, dried and salted as table nuts, or can be ground to make flour that is blended with wheat flour for baking. Male spikes left to rot on trees are used as a salad or pickle.
• Fodder: Leaves are cropped in some parts for fodder, and overripe, immature or fallen fruits are fed to hogs and cattle. The bark leaves and fruits are fed on by the elephants
• Fibre: The inner part of the bark or bast is can be made into cordage or cloth.
• Timber: It produces a medium hardwood; resistant to termite attack; fungal and bacterial decay and is easy to season. It takes polish beautifully. Though not as strong as teak, this wood is considered superior to teak for furniture, construction, turnery and inlay work, masts, oars, implements and musical instruments. Its roots produces high quality carvings and picture frames.
• Gum or resin: It yields resin; latex yields 71.8% resin, consisting of 63.3% fluavilles (yellow) and 8.5% albanes (white). These resins may be valuable in varnishes.
• Latex or rubber: This latex is commonly used as adhesive for mending broken chinaware or earthenware, caulking boats, mending holes of buckets and trapping birds and in some countries it serves as a substitute for rubber.
• Tannin or dyestuff: The bark gives a dark, water-soluble resinous gum that contains 3.3% tannin. When boiled with alum, the sawdust or chips of the heartwood produce a rich yellow dye used for silk and the cotton robes of Buddhist priests.
• Alcohol: Arils are fermented and distilled to produce an alcoholic beverage.
• Medicine: Ashes of leaves, with or without oil, can be used to treat ulcers, diarrhoea, boils, stomach-ache and wounds. Pulp and seeds of the fruit are regarded in some countries as a cooling tonic. Seeds are considered an aphrodisiac. The sap is said to be an anti-syphilitic and a vermifuge. Wood is believed to have sedative properties, and its pith is said to be able to induce abortion. A root decoction can be used to alleviate fever, treat diarrhea, skin diseases and asthma. The bacteriolytic activity of this tree?s latex is equal to that of papaya latex.

Services:

• Erosion control: This tree can be planted to control floods and soil erosion in farms.
• Shade or shelter: Planted at a close spacing, this tree act as a windbreak and is sometimes used as shade for coffee.
• Boundary or barrier or support: It can be used to mark boundaries and the trunk is occasionally used as living support for pepper.
• Intercropping: In some countries, it is planted with coconut groves; In Malaysia, trees have been used as an intercrop in durian orchards, and in India the trees are intercropped with mango and citrus. Young jackfruit orchards may be intercropped with annual cash crops such as banana, sweet corn and groundnut.