Carob Tree Seeds | St. John’s Bread | (Ceratonia siliqua)

The original chocolate substitute. Ancient Mediterranean food tree. Extraordinary in drought.

Ceratonia siliqua, the Carob Tree, is one of the oldest cultivated food plants in the world, a slow-growing, extremely drought-tolerant evergreen tree native to the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East that has been cultivated for its sweet, nutritious seed pods for at least 4,000 years. The pods contain a brown, sweet powder with a flavor somewhat resembling chocolate that has been used as a cocoa substitute, sweetener, and livestock feed throughout Mediterranean history. The seeds were so perfectly uniform in weight that they served as the original unit of measurement for gemstones, the carat, and the tree appears throughout ancient Greek, Roman, and biblical texts as a food plant of significance. If you are looking to buy Carob Tree seeds or grow this ancient Mediterranean food tree from seed, this is the tree that fed the ancient world and continues to anchor dry landscapes in warm climates.

• Produces sweet, nutritious pods used as a natural chocolate substitute and sweetener for over 4,000 years
• Extraordinarily drought-tolerant, surviving on minimal rainfall once established in warm climates
• Evergreen, glossy foliage providing year-round structure in Mediterranean and semi-arid gardens
• One of the longest-cultivated food trees in the Mediterranean basin, grown continuously since antiquity
• Extremely long-lived, with documented specimens in the Middle East over 500 years old

Things you probably did not know about the Carob Tree

The seeds gave us the word carat. Carob seeds, called kerats in Arabic, are so remarkably consistent in weight, approximately 0.2 grams each, that they were used as a standard unit of measurement for precious stones and precious metals throughout the ancient Mediterranean world. The Arabic word for carob seed became the English word carat. Every diamond and gold weight measured today traces its unit back to a carob seed.

John the Baptist reportedly survived in the wilderness on carob pods. The locusts mentioned in the biblical account of John the Baptist's desert diet are widely interpreted by biblical scholars as carob pods rather than actual insects, the Greek word akris being ambiguous between the two. Carob pods have been called Saint John's Bread in European tradition since the medieval period for this reason, and the tree is still sold under that name in some European horticultural trade.

Carob powder has essentially the same caffeine content as decaffeinated coffee. Carob contains no caffeine and no theobromine, the stimulant compound in chocolate. This makes it genuinely useful as a chocolate substitute for people sensitive to caffeine or theobromine, and it is widely used in health food products for this reason. The flavor similarity to chocolate is real though incomplete, and in applications where the full complexity of chocolate is not critical, carob performs well.

The trees are dioecious but require very few male trees for pollination. Carob trees produce male and female flowers on separate trees, requiring at least one male plant within range for the female trees to set fruit. However, male trees are typically planted in ratios of one male to 10 to 15 female trees in commercial orchards because a single male provides sufficient pollen for a large group of female trees. Seed-grown trees cannot be sexed until they flower, which typically requires 5 to 7 years.

Growing Details

• Botanical Name: Ceratonia siliqua
• Stratification: Required, scarification of the hard seed coat, then 30 to 60 days cold stratification
• USDA Zones: 9 to 11
• Soil: Well-drained, rocky, poor quality soils, tolerates alkaline conditions, does not tolerate wet soils
• Light: Full sun
• Height: 30 to 50 feet
• Spread: 25 to 35 feet
• Growth Rate: Slow, 6 to 12 inches per year

Plant it in full sun in the driest, best-drained spot available. Give it no supplemental water once established and expect it to be there for the next few centuries.