Looking for Ciplukan Fruit (Morel Berry)

Hi everyone, how was your day? I hope you're well. Today I went to campus to do my final project, which I recently started doing routinely. I feel more focused on doing this assignment on campus with friends than doing it alone at home.

After finishing with my work for today at around four o'clock in the afternoon, my friend and I intend to take the matoa in the backyard of the campus that we took yesterday, even we have prepared a place to take it home today. But because we were too tired all day in front of the laptop with our work, we finally canceled to take the tall matoa fruit and ended up walking around the campus which was not too wide to check out areas that had not visited in a long time.

In the side corner of the campus yard, we found several morel berry fruit trees or what we often call ciplukan thriving in the open area. Usually, I see this morel berry plant only one or two trees in open areas. But this time, we found this plant growing to several trees. Not many people care about this plant here, we found the ciplukan were old, and some had started to dry up and fall to the ground.

The ciplukan tree is a wild plant that can usually grow for up to a year with fruit covered by a bubble wrap, this is what makes this fruit interesting. When I find a ripe ciplukan fruit, I will break the package until it makes a sound and eats the fruit directly. Ripe ciplukan fruit has a sweet and sour taste with many fine seeds in the fruit.

In my hometown, this tree is usually hard to find when needed, but will grow when no one is looking for it. Like my aunt a few months ago, she was looking for this plant to cure my cousin who had chickenpox. She only found a few trees. To look for this tree is quite far because this tree grows wild in open places such as rice fields, plantations, and other places. Usually, the leaves are used to treat chickenpox by bathing with boiled water from ciplukan leaves regularly. Ciplukan is believed to relieve itching due to chickenpox which has started to water.

When I was kid, I also often ate ripe ciplukan fruit when I found it somewhere. By eating ripe ciplukan fruit can boost the immune system, improve bone health and eye health. Ciplukan trees usually grow in areas that are rarely touched by humans or in large fields. For some reason, in my campus area, this ciplukan tree can grow very fertile. I think this is because the soil in the campus area is fertile and the open area allows the ciplukan tree to grow freely.

There are so many wild plants around us, and not all wild plants are harmful to us. Even some of them have beneficial and healthy properties, of which ciplukan fruit (morel berry) is one of them.

Thank you for reading my blog. Have a nice day. Stay safe and keep healthy.