The Tropical Fruit Forum

Peter and I met up in Jakarta and flew together to Central Kalimanton(Muara Teweh).  Eddie has been with Sinyo since the last part of December and is not going back home until the end of March.  Hardcore.  I've know people who can eat a lot of durian, but I am now convinced there is nobody who can gobble it up like this guy!  It was a great group of guys and having Peter and Eddie along sure made it easier on me.  Not only are they super knowledgeable, but it was great to be able to speak and hear so much English...if you can call Eddie's English!  LOL!

I had five days of fruit hunting.  The first three were incredible and these three alone made the entire trip worth every bit.  The last two days was more desperation and hoping to pull a rabbit out of their hats, but it was a miss with many fruits due to bad timing.  But no big deal.  I won't go into hotel issues here.  The city was much bigger and nicer than my believed we would find.  The people from the city to the ones in the far rural areas were all incredibly nice and welcoming.  Never once did I feel any fear of the area.  Most folks wanted pictures with us and/or waving and smiling.

Takeaways/conclusions:  First off...the artocarpus fruits are amazing.  If you are planning for a future trip, if possible, wait until the last minute to book your flights.  This will give you the best timing to hit as many fruits in season as possible.  Sinyo will send you a list of trees/fruit in each area and the general time frame.  Just keep in mind that the timing can shift either way.  Patience.  Their way of life is uncomplicated by timing restraints.  However, you must insist that the day's tour start early at a given time.  Be firm.  Afterall, you are the one paying for the service.  So early starts and late endings.  Try to keep everyone on track or things can get derailed for a time.  Also insist that there is no smoking in the vehicle.  Probably every male over the age of 14 smokes...non-stop...everywhere.  Sinyo is very very good at finding trees and fruit in these areas.  He has spent lots of time with the locals searching them out.  You could drive or even walk by an area and not have a hint that the trees were nearby.  Many are single trees in a family's yard.  Some are a bit more off the grid.  The first three days of fruit crossed many off of my bucket list.  My pitiful descriptions fall far short of how good some of these really were.   

The group from left to right:  Yuki Kanie from Japan.  Peter Kring from Costa Rica.  Eddie Ahahametoglu from Melbourne, Australia.  Sinyo...local and our guide.  Iplik...local and our driver.  Me.


The boys already had a car full of durio dulcis


Durio dulcis.  Good durian.  A creamy, kind of menthol-like flavor.


Walking the streets.  Baccaurea edulis.  This was excellent.  Flesh still clung to the seed, but not as bad as most others.


A wild nephelium.  Very tasty, but flesh really clung hard to seed.  And tiny.


Durio kutejensis.  Probably the most grown and most sold on streets and elsewhere.  They really love it.  These were not good.  Picked too soon.  We had better later in the week.  Lindsay
remarked that tree-dropped kutejensis was really good.  The riper they were, the better tasting for sure.


Another kutejensis.  Definitely cool looking.  Has the consistency of peanut butter.


Rambutan


Artocarpus lanceifolius (keledang).


Keledang fruit.  Sinyo was 20+ feet up in the tree getting fruit.  Can't stress enough just how good this fruit is.  Very sweet with a little apricot/mandarin orange, hint of acidity.  Almost like the drink mix Tang.  This sky rocketed to a top fruit.  Couldn't get enough of it.





Eddie and Peter checking out some roadside durian.




Artocarpus brevipedunculatus (bondon).  More climbing for Sinyo.  Very similar to keledang in all respects...much smaller.  Flavor may have been even more pronounced.  Crazy good.  Wasn't too many from the tree. 






The family who owned the tree wanted a pic with us.


Mangifera pajang. Mango relative. Strong, not exactly pleasant odor or flavor. Very juicy and as you can see, fibrous as can be. Thick strands too. Felt like fiberglass splinters in my mouth.


More roadside dulcis.


Going a bit off grid here in search of something special.


Prainea limpato.  Not only does it look something from a psychedelic acid trip, it tastes like it too cause nothing this crazy looking should taste this damn good.  Like pulling out giant candy corn.  This fruit is the holy grail of many in the hobby and I am really happy to finally get to try it.  I have read varying reviews about it, but I can tell you that it was quite amazing. 



Durio Graffithii


Baccaurea Laceolata


Willughbeias.  Another group on my bucket list.  Round one is angustifolia and elongated one is sarawacensis.  Yes...flavor brings to mind orange sherbet.  Both delicious.  Angustifolia may be just a tad better, but too close to really call it.  Flesh does cling to the seed, but they are so damn good, you just don't care.




Sinyo way up in a tree looking for willughbeias.


Willughbeia sp. (tampirik).  Again...very similar to other two.  This one has black seeds.


Artocarpus Teysmannii. Big sucker.  This is what was left after dropping three miles! Very similar to marang but much better. Like mashed bananas with a hint of honey. Very delicious. Would loved to have had more.




Artocarpus Kemando.  Looks like brevipedunculatus and about same size too.  But so different.  The shell was very leathery and didn’t want to split open by hand so out comes the knife. Another home run. Sweet with tones of honey and citrus…to me at least. Damn good fruit. Definitely wish we had dozens more.




Durio oxleyanus and dulcis. 


Cleaning seeds with burnt rice hull ash wetted down some.  Makes short work of it.  The willughbeias were the worst to clean.


Durio oxleyanus.  This is a very good durian and we ate all we could purchase.


Went to another limpato tree.  Still delicious.


Artocarpus anisophilus. Fruit looks ready but was really hard. I didn’t try any. Pretty cool color though.


Various selections for consumption.


A deconstructed keledang.  So good.


Must purchase more durian!

This roadside mango is down south in Surin, Thailand.  Everyone amazed at how many and thick the flowers are and say the leaves are not visible.  Even made the news.  Must not be a lot going on in the country...besides the lung crushing pollution.
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?extid=MSG-UNK-UNK-UNK-IOS_GK0T-GK1C&v=625347890027112

We seem to have started our drought season a bit early here.  Very little rain leading into November and I believe we've only had one short shower since mid-November.  The temps are pretty mild right now and humidity decent.  It won't be long before the temps climb and humidity plumets.  Watering keeps me busy.  No pics of the durians.  They have been growing about as fast as the hair on the bottom of your feet.  I know what yer thinking:  "but Jay...I don't have hair growing on the bottom of my feet!".  Yeah...and my durians aren't growing either!

Banganapalli mango finally starting to break out.  A very slow start.  The new growth is still very tiny and branches very thin.  I'm hoping with some pinching of new growth, maybe the lower branches will start putting on some girth.


Sugarloaf mango.  Had a few early blooms that are now in full glory.  What I'm loving is that nearly every tip on the tree has a bloom popping.  Very excited about this.  And yeah...still begging for scions!  Now I've really got to trap more squirrels!  Just relocated #8 last night.  I'm still wondering if it would be worth the effort/cost to build a wire cage around the tree.  There's a big mango around the corner down the street with lots of mangos developing.  Every day I walk past it, there are squirrel-ravaged fruit lying on the sidewalk and street.  So there are still some close by and active.

New blooms popping

Older bloom with little fruitlets


My pulasans have really been doing well and these two finally looking like an actual tree.  The big test will be how well they get thru the high heat and very low humidity coming soon.

another pulasan


My marang grafted onto the older, mature jackfruit.  The graft is now one year old.  Still going strong.  I need to spread the branches and/or tip them to encourage more lateral growth cause right now they want to go straight-freaking up.

Branches are nice and thick.


I filed this project under "there's always something".  I started digging and removing the wet, heavy clay thinking that maybe a fitting was bad.  Not that simple.  Roots from a giant mango we took out a few years ago pushed up a water line to the sprinkler system.  Cracked the damn thing.  Had to dig much more and expose all of the roots so that I could get my pruning saw in there without damaging the chain.

First time bloom.  So pretty stoked.  Wasn't sure when this might happen here.  Not a huge bloom so far and hopefully it is just starting.  That time of year when the mornings are a little cooler.  Also starting the drought season as well as the temps skyrocketing soon...accompanied by low humidity.  I'm still hoping(begging) for a generous soul to ship me some scions.  I'm really hoping to get some of the Zill varieties established here to show the fam what a really good tasting mango is like.

Another video from the Borneo Foresters.  Some interesting techniques.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNKKwW166Kc&t=119s

Ordering fruit online is often a crap shoot and here in Thailand is no exception.  Very few vendors take the time to box up the fruit well.  Most are just sellers...getting the fruit from various farms and have no say when the fruit is picked.  So a lot of times the fruit is picked too soon.  Vendors rarely disclose the size of the fruit.  Can't go by the pictures because they pluck any photo from the web that suits their purpose.  None of these are really mainstream fruits for the Bangkok markets, so it is sometimes the only way to get to taste some new fruits.

Below is pulasan.  Smallest pulasans I've ever encountered!  Scant flesh.  A shame too because the flavor was the bomb!  As good as the best pulasan I've had in Puerto Ric...including Juans.  Probably from a seedling since the flesh clung viciously to the seed...what little flesh there was.  The fruit ordered last year was bigger, but picked far too soon to develop any real sweetness and flavor character.


This one is Baccaurea macrocarpa.  I may have had this in PR, but we were always early and the fruit were sour.  I was surprised how sweet and delicious these could be.  Very tasty.  However... the flesh clung to the seed even worse than the pulasan.  Was like quenepas and santol.  Even sucking the juice from the flesh was a battle.  Jaws got tired.



Next is Pometia pinnata...matoa or crystal longan.  Requires a hard pop on the counter with palm of hand or mallet to open.  Once the shell is cracked, the flesh comes out easily.  Bigger than longan, and the taste is very similar.  Free stone.  I'm not a fan of longan, so...

Terry Mynhier is an American durian farmer way out in the boonies of Kanchanaburi province, Thailand.  Not an investor, but a get-your-hands-dirty, sweating-your-ass-off, working-all-day, farmer.  I've chatted often with Terry on Facebook for well over a year and finally got to meet him and see his farms for the first time.  He has run several successful businesses around the world, including real estate, so he has the mindset to make durian production successful as well.  He also has a Thai wife who grew up on a farm and this is the ace up his sleeve.  Terry did his durian research online.  He got out amongst the locals and learned all that he could about growing durian.  This included planting on mounds and double tree planting.  Double tree planting is not only insurance...in case one dies...but allows the trees to grow together and increase production.



Terry currently has three farms and only one of the farms has mature durian producing fruit.  Monthong is the main crop.  He has planted Chanee, Gan Yao, Kradum, Black Thorn, and Musang King.  What he found was Monthong is pretty much the only variety that will do well in his area.  Chanee does okay while the rest are a struggle to keep alive.  These are being replaced by Monthong as they die and are pulled out.  The Monthong just does much better in their drier climate.  The other consideration, and probably the most influential, is that the commercial market ONLY wants Monthong.

My buddy Tong Chom drove down to meet and join us.  This was also the first time that we meet in person.  It was great having him along and look forward to future fruit tours together.






All pics above are from the farm with the youngest trees.  Over 900 trees.  Terry has several water retention areas and I believe will be digging another pond soon.  He currently has three wells supplying them and the trees.  This year the heat and drought was just brutal and has been very hard on durian in particular.  Terry was giving his trees lots of water every single day and it certainly paid off.  The trees look great and the older ones produced tons of fruit.  Most farmers in the area did not water for one reason of another.  They lost many trees and those that survived failed to fruit.  The younger trees on this farm will be kept pruned to a height of no more than 6 meters.







The above pics are from the older farm with the mature and producing durians.  He also grows and markets mangosteen.  Other trees include some rambutan, pomelo, and a few others.  There were pickers dropping fruit to go to export or to local markets.  Still lots of fruit on the trees.



Most of the trees were very healthy and producing well.  But no matter how much prevention effort is expended, issues still pop up.  The tree in the pic was attacked by a boring insect that carries a deadly disease and infects the tree.  The bark around the entry area must be scraped away until clean, healthy bark is hit.  Then that brown splotch will be dug out, then the tree will be treated.  It is somewhat manageable at this stage.  However, if the disease hits the roots, then it is game over and nothing will stop the decline.



We spent the entire afternoon and well into the evening with Terry and his wife.  They were fantastic hosts and we ate our fill of mangosteens and durian.  The highlight was a Monthong/Gan Yao hybrid that was just out of this world.  So many flavors...bitter chocolate, coffee, caramel, citrus...and so smooth and creamy.  I recorded a wonderful interview with Terry, but unfortunately, my Iphone decided to somehow trash it altogether.

He has two full-time workers and will contract out to locals for larger projects, harvesting, and such.  I asked him about failures and/or unexpected challenges.  Planting varieties other than just Monthong was a failure on his part.  While these other varieties were planted in much lower numbers, he feels that he did not heed the local's advice as much as he should have.  So mistakes were made.  The heat and drought were bad enough to contend with, but the very low humidity really punched below the belt.  Constant watering during the drought is certainly necessary, but higher humidity will definitely give the trees a much better advantage to survive.  His concern is that this trend continues or gets worse as people predict.  He hopes it won't last indefinitely.

Update on my marang grafted onto jackfruit experiment.  The plan was to slowly start cutting the rootstock away from beneath the graft.  Well, back on April 14, on my second cut, I mistakenly cut all the way thru the rootstock.  By the next morning, all of the leaves had dried completely up.  I should have removed them all after severing the rootstock, but I thought it has had plenty of time to sync up...grafted on Jan 2.  After the discovery, I removed all of the leaves except for part of one at the top.  So the graft has been attached to the jackfruit only since April 14.  As of today, as you can see in the pic, the graft is pushing a nice new leaf from the tip.  I'm going to call that a positive sign.  Hopefully it will continue to push.

I found several papers on grafting jackfruit onto marang, but none for marang onto jack.  There is a good probability of eventual failure, but it's a neat experiment for me in the meantime.

I approach grafted the marang onto the jack back on January 2.  As you can see, the graft is very secure and the bark is starting to close in on the graft site.  I'm being very patient/cautious.  I plan to leave the root ball attached until more of the graft is covered, then I will slowly cut away below the graft.

Today I removed the huge branch the graft is on.  Hopefully this will direct more energy into the graft.  I will remove the rest of the branches after this as well.  I want to keep them for now to support the whole tree.  The jackfruit itself is pretty much a dud and I would have removed it, but we'll see how this pans out.

Cherapu...button mangosteen...garcinia prainiana.  I've been waiting 20 years to taste this fruit.  Much smaller than I thought they would be, but even the small ones had a surprising amount of flesh to them.  This is the first time that a shipment has gone somewhat bad.  Much of the fruit is smashed and half the box is soaked and falling apart.

The fruit itself is fabulous.  I really like this.  It has the tropical tang with hints of garcinia and tangerine.  They peel open very easily and the seeds come out without much hassle...and only a few of those.

The bad.  Latex latex latex!!  Fingers and lips were covered with a thick coating of it.  My teeth!  They felt like they were covered in epoxy that was half cured.  I ruined a tooth brush cause it is now all gummed up.  Jeesh!

Someone please tell me that this is not normal and that the latex is not always this bad!

Anybody familiar with this Zill selection?  A buddy has this, but I cannot find any info on this.

Believe it or not, it has been terribly dry here with humidity steadily under 50%.  My durians and pulasan have not been happy at all.  Lots of crisp edges on the leaves.  I upped the spraying and watering, even soaking the grass and ground around the trees hoping to raise the humidity around them.  Seemed to have helped along with some rains finally settling in.  The trees were always putting out some new growth, but not like this.  Hoping to get them into the mounds next month sometime.