The Tropical Fruit Forum

I got a call from my neighbor today around 2:30pm that there is a car parked on the street and two men were in my yard, loading jakfruits into their car. He confronted them and wouldn't let them drive away. I go outside, I confront them. I explain that what they did is stealing. They offer to pay for them. I tell them they are not buy anything from me, they are not leaving here with any jakfruit. They removed the jakfruits they stole from the back of the car. One might have been on the ground, the other was spewing latex, definitely picked from a tree.  I tell them to leave. I have a picture of the car and the license plate.  Black newer Honda CRV. Two men in their 40s or 50s.

Taste a fruit, take a picture, share your thoughts. I will start.


I have a grafted "Small" tree, which I think it also was release by Fairchild as "Papi". I got it from Pine Island Nursery a few months after the Jakfruit festival at Fairchild. I picked the fruit from the tree while it was still hard. It started to smell on day 2. It was fully soft and smelling strongly on day 3, which is when I tasted it.

The flavor was sweet. It had a mild banana flavor. The flavor was decent. I prefer some acidity in the flavor but I think it would generally be considered agreeable. 

The texture was very soft and very stringy and fibrous. Strangely, the bulbs were well attached to the core and sides. Normally, with this level of softness, the bulbs are easy to remove and the rind is thin. The fibrous texture was very off-putting.

The latex level was medium to high. My lips were covered quickly by the small amount I ate. Normally when I eat a jakfruit, I dig in with my bare hands. For this fruit, I ate the flesh with a fork because of the soft stringy texture and the latex. As I lifted the flesh from the cut fruit, latex strings connecting back to the fruit followed my movements.

General impressions, flavor was ok, texture was horrible, latex was bad, and this variety does not get my recommendation. I will remove this tree.

I will update with pictures later. PostImage is getting javascript errors at the moment. 

I am selling 4 pound bags of mauritius lychee fruit for $20 a bag. Only 5 bags for sale. Pm or email me. I also have some glenn and haden mangos for $1 per lbs. Cash, zelle, or paypal accepted.

These fruit have been sold.

I currently have (while supplies last):
Goldnugget - 8lbs - $16
Goldnugget - 10lbs - $20
Mai 3 - 11lbs - $22
Mai 3 - 14lbs - $28

I am located in Southwest Ranches, FL (I-75 and Griffin Road). Send me an email or PM to arrange a purchase.

I finally took the time to get my soil analyzed.  I wish I had done this when I moved in.  I am pretty lazy and hard headed.  My thanks to Jeff (Cookiemonster) and others for posting so much great information on soil testing and analysis.  I can now see that my pH, calcium, and zinc are way high. My potassium is way low(causing magnesium problems), phosphorus and manganese are low too.  I bought 550 pounds of Tiger90 before I did the test. It is still sitting in a shed. After I bought it, I stopped myself from applying it until I got the testing done. 

 

I am located a few miles west of I-75 and Griffin Road.  Picked today.

Seems like our wet winter kept my jakfruit trees in top condition.  I really do not have a baseline yet but for the trees in my yard mature enough to fruit, it seems like it will be a heavy fruiting year.

Post some pictures of your fruiting jakfruit trees and let us all know how things are progressing!

Here are some pictures from my grafted Bangkok Lemon, planted 4/7/13 from a 3gal pot.  The tree is around 18ft tall by 12 ft wide. There are around 20 fruit on the tree. The fruiting started in early December. New fruits are still emerging.  This is the first year that this tree is fruiting

There are at least 8 forming fruit in this picture

February of 2013, I took a trip to Robert is Here and paid a lot of money for a 25 pound jakfruit. As the name states, Robert was here, and I asked him if he had a clue what variety the jakfruit might be.  He asked one of the workers in the back area but the most definitive answer they were able to give was a shrug of the shoulders.  I waited a few days for it to ripen and based on the long pointed bulbs, flesh color, time of year, and flavor guessed it to be a J-31. 

I decided to plant some of the seeds, thinking that the seedlings might give off season fruit. August 21, 2013, I planted 5 of the seedings in a line next to a fence, 6 feet apart.  The trees all grew differently, some are dense and some sparse, some compact and some are reaching for the sky.  All the trees flowered heavily this year, but all appeared to be male flowers.  The first in the line, a dense, medium height tree, actually put out a female. 

On Wednesday, I took a look at the fruit. I squeezed it and it was rock hard. I gave it a tap and the sound it made was a sharp ping.  It sounded like an over-inflated red rubber ball, the kind used for playing dodge ball. Today, my mom visits the house and she inquires about the jakfruit and she touches it and it was soft! In two days it goes from not being close to ripe to ready for eating.

The fruit weighted 10 pounds.  I cut it in half and was shocked to see orange bulbs.  The flesh was crisp, sweet, with a tiny bit of acidity.  The flavor reminds me of a little bit of the red LifeSavers candy, but I haven't had one in 30 years so I may be delusional.

Oddly, while eating half the fruit, I only encountered one normal seed.  All the others were aborts, smaller than a pea. When seeds are aborted in jakfruits, the bulb flesh does not fully develop.  I had very little rain the last few months, which may have been a factor with all the aborted seeds and thin flesh of the bulbs. 

It will be interesting to see what happens next year!

This rollinia has been in the ground for 2 years.  It is about 4 ft tall.  I cannot keep the leaves green.  Now the leaves are cupped and curved in addition to the yellowing.  I have another rollinia planted 15 ft away that is double the size and has no deficiency issues. 

In Feb, March, and April I did a chelated iron drench with magnesium, manganese, and zinc.  In March, I did a foliar spray with southern ag citrus nutritional spray 3/4 rate with miracle grow at 1/2 rate.  The beginning of March, I fertilized with Diamond R 8-3-9 using a broadcast spreader.  The tree is mulched beyond the drip line.

I picked these Lisa atemoyas this morning.  My atemoya trees are only two years in the ground.  I was planting to wait another year before attempting to fruit them.   When I pruned them in late June to get them to branch more, they flowered like crazy and I couldn't resist trying to pollinate them.  These 5 are all the success I had on the Lisa.  I got 2 on Page and 1 on Priestly but they are small and malformed. Hard to beat fruit of any kind in January.  All together, they weighted in at 3.5 pounds.  The biggest was .8 pounds and the smallest .3 pounds.  Now I have to endure the agonizing wait until they ripen!!!

When ever your spouse, who is not a fruit tree addict, allows you to plant something fruit bearing in "restricted space", AKA "the forbidden zone", it is cause for celebration!  My wife granted me permission to plant pineapples in the front yard.  My front yard is relatively barren except for palm trees and a loquat tree that was probably planted as an ornamental.

Back in May/June of this year, I executed phase 1 of my plan.  I acquired a stupid number of tissue cultured pineapple plants.  I offered them up to you all, my brothers and sisters who share my fruit tree affliction. Luckily for me, not many of you took advantage.  I have not had a single casualty either.  These plants can take some abuse.

Now that the weather has cooled a bit, I decided to execute my incursion into the forbidden zone. In the middle of my front yard is a lonely palm,  planted in an over-sized raised area.  Previously only weeds covered the empty space.

Behold the pineapple greatness!!! (well, at least the beginnings of it)  25 plants in the ground so far and that has barely put a dent in my stocks.