Jackfruit-most amazing and useful tree
Channel: Khandige Vikas Bhat
Date: 2011-03-31

Artocarpus Heterophyllus (Jackfruit) tree, bark, flower and fruits.
An essential feature of a forest farm is the fruit trees.

Make sure to have at least 1 tree of all the fruit tree that grow in your region. If you like a particular fruit then you could plant more. A fruit orchard with 20 chikoo trees along with a few of all the others like mango, lemon, orange, jamun, jackfruit, star fruit, guava, amla, papaya, banana, hogplum (for pickle and herb), mimosups elengi, wild badam, drumstick etc. can be fitted nicely in 2 or 3 acres.

Sapota can fetch a little cash along with bananas. All other fruits are only enough for our family and friends only at a this 3 acre farm model forest farm.

The jack is an amazing source of abundant, good food. The unripe fruits are cooked into a variety of delicious recipes. The taste is superb and the texture just like mutton, but it is veg with no meat smell! 

Seeds of the fruit is high-protien and is storable food. Can be roasted over fire and eaten. Seeds also are cooked into sambhar and other south Indian dishes. Fruits are relished by all forest animals and people too.

The fruiting is extended over many months, providing raw jack as a vegetable in the first few months, followed by ripe fruits and the edible seeds for later part of the season. The surplus is made into a sweet dry sheet and consumed slowly. Not all becoming ripe together all at once like mangoes is an advantage.

So, it a dependable source of nutritional security for the farmer.

Now. about the jack trees medicinal uses as per Ayurvedic texts:
1) Roots are supposed to be anti diarrhoeal.
2) Leaves are useful in treating fevers, wounds, boils and other Pitta and Kapha complications.
3) Unripe fruits are acrid, astringent, carminative and tonic. Good for debility and dyspepsia.
4) The ripe fruits are sweet, cooling, laxative and aphrodisiac. Useful in vitiated Vata, Pitta and ulcers. Always eat them on empty stomach. It is very heavy to digest and so it is better avoided after a heavy meal .
5) Seeds are sweet, diuretic, aphrodisiac and constipating. Cooked or roasted and eaten.
6) Wood is a nervine sedative.
7) Latex useful in opthalmitisand pharyngitis as per reputable text written by pundits of Vaidya Shalas of Kerala.

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