Its all start back in 1996 in search of a zero latex Jackfruit. I got tire of cleaning my knife & my gummy mouth & hands eating one of my favorite fruit. Back then I have raided PIN, Excalibur, Treehouse, several defunct nurseries & backyard Surinamese growers in west Palm beach looking for that elusive tree & I bought them all. Many were promised low latex but to me it was false advertisement, I still have to rinse my hand with olive oils before a soapy water rinse to get everything off. The freeze of several years back thank God kill hundred of my trees so they free lot of real estate for newer selections. I discovered Ebay back then & bought chempedak, Vietnamese baby jack, marang every artocarpus & kissing cousins for my cold resistant program of breeding Jackfruit with zero latex, small seeds, large carpel, 70% yield or better to rag & edible rag, easy peel skin like a chepadek, small fruit like the vietnamese baby jacfruit.
After many insults & encouragement by framily ( friend & family), passerby & fellow fruit fanatics who had the sorry benefit of tasting & growing my breeding selections, I harvested my first
designer jackfruit. If the second fruit replicate the first fruit; I will name it Boca orange snob fot eluding me all these years!
Very large orange yellow carpel, me & my friend ate the sweet crispy delicious rags about three lbs before we got full & visit our porcelain friend.
Absolutely a joy to rip apart with my hands, my wife gave me a Dirty look; she like a man with a slow hand!
My failures in breeding; dam fruit scale in at 28lbs, I was hoping 5-10 lbs (its parent were Vietnamese baby seedling x Pakistan seedling x searle's brothers seedling. It parent is a 10-15 compact tree in my front door entrance. The ripe skin did not peel nicely like vietnamese baby jack, i had to massage my hands gently to free them; wife was impressed! It had a very strong linging odor that the kids from church school complaining. But the kids got no problem stuffing their face with crunchy sweet goodness; at first they thought it was my usual fart. Rag & rind attract coons, rats, fruitflies & Jewish Grannies complains out walking pamper pooch predawn in my hood before waste management pickup garbage today. We harvest over powering fruit when we smell it ripening yesterday. It was planted as a seedling in december 2009.
My success No Latex, just rinse hand with water to take the sugary syrupy off. After hand dry that juicy fruit gum smell prevail last almost a day. Tree is small & compact to bearing, flower last year but didnot set fruit like this year. Survive 2010 freeze with no dieback as a seedling when my other grafted tree frooze dieback to the ground. I have ten of these trees in west palm so I will hope the other seedlings will display some uniqueness this one did not( however this one was the fastest to flower in three years from seed). The seeds are small compare to the edible carpel. Yield was almost 75% of edible matter.
I will kill some of its parents this weekend unless I am out snakehead fishing, so I can have room to plants it offsprings & see if I can stabilize it over the next decade, hopefully getting my freeze resistant, 5-10 lbs round fruit, zero latex, low odor, thin rind easy to peel with bear hand, edible rags that is not so laxative. More tart into it cause right now its french pastry sweet!