What an absolutely incredible day at Brad’s Orchard today. We had Cherimoyas, Annona hybrids, Mangos, Longans, Bananas, Dragonfruit, Passionfruit, Kei Apple, Gin Berries, Surinam Cherries, the new Pink Pineapple, White Jade or White Sugarloaf pineapple, Guava, Watermelon, Fingerlimes, persimmons, Sugarcane, pomegranates and Jujubes.
Safety was a top priority and we were prepared with alcohol, disinfectant wipes, gloves, masks and social distancing.
I was amazed at the huge spread of different varieties of fruit available at this time of year. I believe the Pink fleshed pineapple was the only fruit that was purchased. After breakfast, we started cutting up the fruit and there was so much fruit that we barely made a dent. Not all the fruit are shown in the pictures I posted. There were a bunch more Cherimoyas on the side, in the house and on the trees.
Cherimoyas are super sweet so we started off with some shade grown Parfianka Pomegranates. I noticed that the fruit grown in the shade had lighter colored arils, lower Brix, lower acidity and an even softer seed. The shade grown fruit tasted sweet with very little acidity and tasted sweeter than the higher Brix Full sun fruit. The Shade grown Parfianka had a Brix of 16.5% and the full sun fruit had a Brix reading of 17.5% for these particular fruit.
Brad started cutting up a bunch of cherimoyas while I started cutting up a small Lemon Zest mango. The LZ was only about the size of a Po Pyu Kalay because it came from my tree that produced a cluster of 5 fruit from a single branch. The LZ was so small that not everyone got a piece but from the comments I heard, it was an extremely good fruit. This LZ only had a Brix of 22.5% so we know it was not at its peak performance but it must have been good none the less, from what I heard. A perfect LZ grown in SoCal has a Brix around 27-28%. LZ gets as high as 32% in SoCal but at this Brix level, it is too sweet and the sugar acid balance is thrown off. I didn’t take a close up of the LZ fruit but you can easily spot the yellow fruit by the refractometer(thanks Sheehan).
The cherimoyas were excellent but I didn’t get to taste all of them because I was helping out with the cutting. From the moyas I tasted, HoneyHart was very good with an off the charts Brix reading(30+?). There was also another fruit that Brad cut open that was supposed to have red flesh but it was more of slight barely noticeable pink. We actually don’t know if the little pink coloration we saw was from the cherimoya or from the juice of the pink Pineapple that got onto the knife. I don’t recall what the name of that fruit is but here’s a picture of the fruit in question
Simon