Trivia : Pomegranate - The Real Forbidden Fruit of the Garden of Eden?

A pomegranate tree laden with fruits

History and facts about the Pomegranate fruit : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomegranate

Some Jewish scholars believe that the forbidden fruit in the garden of Eden was the pomegranate. Maybe it's true because the pomegranate fruit tastes heavenly, and that must be the reason why Adam and Eve were tempted to eat the fruit. If you haven't tasted a pomegranate try one now! 

When I was working abroad, my boss went on a business trip to Azerbaijan? or Armenia? not so sure now which of these two countries. When he came back from his trip he brought with him some fruits : pears, grapes and pomegranates which are native to the region. I ate one pomegranate fruit and it has  plenty of seeds. After eating, I put the seeds in a paper napkin to throw them in a garbage bin but there wasn't  any available around, so I put the seeds inside one of the pockets of my laptop bag and forgot all about it. 

When I was already permanently back in Manila, I was checking for some important things in the small pockets of my laptop bag and guess what I found? Small brown seeds. The seeds were too dried and shrunken, small and hard, they looked like small stones bigger than sesame seeds. For a while,  I can't figure out what they were, until I suddenly remembered what I had put in that pocket almost a year before. There were about 30 seeds. I was about to throw them away but decided to just put them in one of the ceramic plant pots in our backyard. I doubted if they would grow, thinking they were too dried to even sprout. I was just curious to see how a pomegranate plant would look, in case  the seeds grow. After a few weeks, I checked the pot and saw some small sprouts not unlike alfalfa sprouts, really small. There were three small sprouts  and I thought maybe they were just grasses, so I just let them grow. Months passed and they had turned into small shrubs with small leaves. I googled pomegranate in my laptop and confirmed that those plants in the pot were indeed pomegranate plants with the same leaves as the ones that I saw in the webpages. Out of the many seeds I put in the pot, only three grew.

Now these pomegranate trees are almost four-foot high and growing healthy. The seeds that I planted came from a very good and sweet variety of a pomegranate similar to the picture of the fruit above. I do not know if  when they would bear fruit or  if they would even bear fruit in a tropical country. They say that pomegranate tree can adjust to climates and they grow in the drier areas of South East Asia and the Caribbean, which are tropical areas.

I hope they would bear fruits someday and if the Jewish scholars' belief is really true, then I would have the real forbidden fruit of the Garden of Eden in my backyard. 

Imported pomegranate trees thriving in the Philippines