The Tropical Fruit Forum

Gone Troppo,
                    Of those that Steph mentions,we have Fairchild, M. casturi, and M.odorata. All over 35 years.  The kuini is the most disease resistant for us, completely clean fruit,bears well every couple of years, very pretty tree in flower, flowers v.well,with large panicles of red, scented flowers.  The casturi should be suitable for you, but it's out of its zone here. (1,000 metres altitude ) Grafted on indica, very healthy tree, but I haven't seen a single flower.   Fairchild is a small, healthy,dense
tree,and bears very clean fruit as well.   Articles on the internet will tell you that it is from Panama, but David Fairchild collected the seed from fruit he ate in Saigon, and sent them to the U.S. research station in Panama.  So it's a Vietnamese cultivar. We have four other Vietnamese cultivars. Fairchild is the most disease resisitant of them. The seeds of  Fairchild that I've opened were mainly mono,a couple were poly. Probably safer to graft it.    Kuini is poly.  I can send
seed of Kuini when it fruits next,or you can collect some scions of them if you're up this way sometime.  Fairchild has small fruit,but fibreless and well-flavoured. I like the kuini as well, but probably too strong-flavoured for some.

I'm sure durian is king for some people. But for most durian lovers it's an acquired taste, acquired in one's youth. To me it's not really a fruit. More like a cross between fruit, vegetable, meat, and cheese or whatever you might taste, smell, or feel. Nothing that smells that bad can be king outside of it's natural range where people grow up eating it. Face it durian lovers, your favorite fruit has serious issues for many people.

And based on my experience stone fruits beat mango. But at least mango is a real fruit that tastes like a fruit, can be delicious, and has no really offensive characteristics like durian. Mango is a mess to eat, has fiber, and is much more difficult to pick and ripen properly than stone fruit.

Going strictly on taste from what I've eaten it's the stone fruits I listed above. But hey this is difficult. I took me 35 years to figure out how to grow the best stone fruit.

Gone Tropo made me curious so I just measured a few of my trees. P88 is about 253 cm high after 1 year in the ground. PK is 207cm high, I believe I planted it shortly after the P88. P88 is the highest but the PK has better developed laterals. Best seedling from the 2022 season is 177cm high (seed collected in late March, was an excellent fruit but variety/source is unknown).