This big boy is known as the village cucumber and is grown here on the ridges around wetland rice.  It is used in soup.  I asked if it is just a mature version of a regular cucumber and the vendors said it was not.


Raw, it tastes pretty much like a cucumber.  No bitterness but significant acidity.


When I scooped out the seeds, they were very wet so I put them in a strainer and ...


got this much juice.
I added salt to the juice, but didn't taste very good.
I added some sugar to cut the acidity, but still didn't taste so good.
I added an ice cube and gave to my wife.
She drank some, added another ice cube and gave it back to me.
Strangely, we both sort of like it, but don't seem to be able to drink much of it.  It is more like tomato juice than a tree fruit juice.

The soup we made has the entire village cucumber (minus the seeds), half a chicken, lots of moringa leaves, some salt and onion.  It is very nice.

Vendors said that if I planted the seed fresh, it would be eaten by ants.  They advised me to dry the seed before planting it.

Sorry to be off topic, but on divergent topic....
M. caesia does have texture like a pear and taste like a sour sop.  Not exactly, of course, but it was an excellent comparison.  The ones in Tenom would be like a pear in texture, but with coarse hairs from the seed throughout  the flesh once you got a couple of cm down from the skin.  The sugar:acid ratio is like a soursop as is the sugar and acid per 100g of fruit... as is the colour.

Don't think M. caesia is as rare as they make it out to be in that movie. Seems like a lot of hype.

My wife says the white mango, Wani in Bali is not the wani of Borneo (M. odorata), but either M. caesia or M. kemanga, however, they said it was fiberless, which the M. caesia here certainly is not.  At the very least, it may be a particularly good M. caesia.

Recently watched my Dacryodes rostrata emerge from the soil, make some crazy-looking leaves and then die.  As it turned out, the crazy-looking leaves were not leaves and now the plant has some real, normal-looking leaves, the rumours of its death, greatly exaggerated.

What is this white mango they keep talking about? I guess it's a different mangifera species since it took them 15-20 years to figure out what is a compatible rootstock??
I just got to taste Lalee jewo for first time. Very nice. I will make a separate posting about it soon.

perhaps M. caesia, the only white fleshed Mangifera I know of that you can eat out of hand.

Quote from: pj1881 (Patrick) on March 06, 2013, 06:27:59 AM

Quote from: DurianLover on March 06, 2013, 12:32:11 AM

part one is here: The Fruit Hunters - Part 1 - The Evolution of Desire
your link marked as part 2

Thats Sheehan at 2:14-2:18!

Nice. At least my 5 seconds got me a spot in the credits!

They edited what I said and I think it was taken from two different questions and combined into one.

For some reason I imagined Sheehan to be about 75 yrs old with a white beard.  The video evidence did not support my image.

The oxyleanus i've had here were a lot smaller than most zibethinus. Either your oxyleanus is a lot bigger than ours or your zibethinus in comparison photo is very small?

This year there were some really large D. oxleyanus fruits in the market.  I asked the seller if they were from a different tree (as there were piles of smaller ones as well)  He claimed they were all from one tree.  There is always a language barrier in these interviews though, so even though I repeat the same question in several ways to make sure, if they don't volunteer the information, I take it with a grain of salt.

I have also found this year that  overripe D. oxleyanus is bitter.

Even in Java, above 600m, they don't grow salak as the slightly colder temperature lessens the quality of the fruit and the crop size.

How about allspice?  Love the aroma and its a great BBQ wood.

It grows in the shade, but a tree in the shade is very upright and not so attractive compared to one in the open which gets a nicer form.  Allspice is the wood of choice for plough handles in Belize where there are 900 species of wood to choose from.  You just stare at the tree until you see the shape you are looking for.  I got some amazing light-weight matching cart handles this way.  Too valuable to burn in my opinion.

 B. parviflora fruits are highly variable as you can read below:

Fruits fusiform, 1–3-seeded berries, with or without 4–6 narrow wings, 16–32 by 7–15 mm, glabrous to sparsely hairy outside, raised glands present, dull red to maroon turning purple to black when fresh; pericarp c. 1–2.5 mm thick, glabrous on both sides; column 10–18 mm long, straight. Seeds ellipsoid, laterally flattened, 9–16 by 4–8 by 1–5 mm; arillode red to purple to white; cotyledons orbicular to square, membranous, 5.5–11 by 4–6 by 0.5–3.5 mm, radicle up to 1.5 mm long.
    Distribution — Thailand, Peninsular Malaysia, Sumatra, Borneo.

I dug up 3 small seedlings of Arenga pinnata the other day from a near 100% shade situation and gave each its own plant bag.  Trees are in the shade of a beluntas bush now.  After the shock of transplant has passed, what kind of light conditions will be ideal for my young palms?

This is a commercial fruit in Dominica, so clearly it has wide appeal.   I like them.