EasySeeds™ Custard Apple, Sweet Apple, Sugar Apple, Sweetsop, Netted Custard Apple, Annona Reticulata,Bull's heart, Sitaphal Seeds

Netted Custard Apple is a fruit which is a close cousin of Sugar Apple. The tree that bears these fruits is a small deciduous or semi-evergreen tree sometimes reaching 10 metres tall and a native of Central America. The ill-smelling leaves are deciduous, alternate, oblong or narrow-lanceolate, 10-20 cm long, 2-5 cm wide, with conspicuous veins. Flowers, in drooping clusters, are fragrant, slender, with 3 outer fleshy, narrow petals 2-3 cm long, light-green externally and pale-yellow with a dark-red or purple spot on the inside at the base. The flowers never fully open. The compound fruit, 8-16 cm in diameter, may be symmetrically heart-shaped, lopsided, or irregular; or nearly round, or oblate, with a deep or shallow depression at the base. The skin, thin but tough, may be yellow or brownish when ripe, with a pink, reddish or brownish-red blush, and faintly, moderately, or distinctly netted.

Custard apple, (genus Annona), genus of about 160 species of small trees or shrubs of the family Annonaceae, native to the New World tropics. Custard apples are of local importance as traditional medicines, and several species are commercially grown for their edible fruits.

Members of the genus are typically evergreen or semideciduous plants and cannot tolerate frost. The leaves can be leathery or hairy and are generally ovate with smooth margins. The unusual flowers feature six to eight fleshy curved petals in two whorls and numerous stamens and pistils. The fruits are often scaly and succulent and are sometimes segmented.