Achacha taste?

sternus1 says...
Jaz, you've made the error of buying boutique fruit from Woolies. I bet they charged a fortune for them too.

Achacha are an incredibly good fruit. They definitely do have mangosteen(ish) qualities, but taste more sherbety, to me. They are up there with the best of the Garcinia which makes them up there with the best of everything.

BJ should be able to tell you where to get some good ones when he comes on.

s

Jaz says...
I think I paid about $3.44 for the half kilo, which I thought was pretty good, but I haven't bought them before so I wouldn't know.

I tried a few more and I definitely think they're unripe. One or two were almost ripe, and would've been delicious had they been on the tree a little longer. But they others were all that horrible leafy flavour. They left a dry feeling in my mouth too. At least I got a bunch of seeds out of it.

I definitely want to try some good ones though, if I can find them.

sternus1 says...
Jaz don't be put off by reports of them taking forever to fruit. Marcotted aka air layered trees of some varieties will produce in as little as 4 years, possibly three.

MaryT says...
BJ the lychees and longans from the supermarkets here have been exceptional; mangoes too, and grapes. They're not always good, of course.

gimme says...
I got to try achacha this year. Very nice! A bit beaten about outside but perfect inside! I asked my local fruit shop to get some from Romeos at rocklea markets. Can I grow the seeds? I'm confused about the PBR on it, I know there is a whole thread about this somewhere but surely I can grow a species plant from seed and share/sell it?.

Some good Longan in woollies this week and since they weren't in the system the checkout chic gave them to me :)

Brain says...
with PBR, it means you can't profit from it (i.e. selling the tree (with its genetics), or fruits which originated from the PBR plant). Unless of course you have an agreement with the PBR holder and give them a royalty.

That said, you can grow something from seed, as the PBR does not prohibit anyone from improving the original PBR plant (quite an enlighten policy actually), or wait until the PBR expires (last check, I recall reading a 20 years limit but don't quote me.)

Of course if you grew something from seed and can jump through hoops to demonstrate your plant is at least different from the PBR plant, you may end up with your very own PBR.

I think sharing is also a no, as you infringe the profitability of the PBR holder.

on another note, a B3 I planted took 5 years to flower and form 1 lychee. Based on my observations, and this may not be true for all cases, I believe the B3 needs to be of decent size (i.e. 1mx1m box) before any fruit comes along. As they are very slow growing initially, I suspect your B3 is still quite small?

Mike Tr says...
Garcinia humilis from the commercial source is PBRed in Australia.Surprise,surprise there is no such species since the reassignment of Rheedia and G.laterifolia is not a synonym.The achachairu is the proper name and it is undescribed. It wasn't bred here either.If it wasn't bred here,the name is wrong and they are independently streaming in from Bolivian and Brazilian sources how could someone be prosecuted?

Brain says...
I think with PBRs, is like some other (questionable) IP rights, you just have to be the first to 'discover' and 'register' it and therefore you own it. Like some finger limes, it's been grown in the rainforest of Aus for eons and all it takes is for someone to take a plant, propagate it in a way that satisfy PBR requirements and thus it's yours! The other argument is of course commercial, you invested all this money & time and you expect to protect your returns.

I'm not familiar with Achacha, but I suppose it's the same deal, those folks must have brought some into Aus and being the 'first' to go through the process is enough.

Like all things in life, the one who has more money to pay the lawyers is the one most likely to win.

MaryT says...
That's why we must propagate our own name brands in our backyards :)

sternus1 says...
JE the...entitlement, or the eligibility granted to an organization or an individual is very often a process of cumulative selection which results in what you quite rightly identify as anomalies. Anomalies that don't make any sense at all. Why did nobody protest? There was no reason to, or nobody thought to.

It's a bit like evolution by natural selection; whatever works just enough is good enough; it's patchwork, not architecture. Consider this example of how badly engineered specific parts of the human body are, taken from a sceptic site:

"The nerve 'wiring' of the mammalian larynx is also bizarre. Nerve signals for bodily operations travel from the brain down the spine, then branch off. Fair enough. The larynx is in the neck, so one might expect that the relevant nerve would come off the spine at the neck. And, it does: the recurrent laryngeal nerve originates from the spinal cord in the neck, as a branch of the vagus nerve. But then, bizarrely, rather than taking a direct route across the neck, it instead passes down the neck and into the chest, loops under the posterior side of the aorta by the heart, then travels right back up again to the larynx. Which is a waste of materials by anyone's standard, but in the case of the giraffe, it implies a Creator so set on the mammalian Bauplan that an extra 10 to 15 feet of nerve is needed"

The main danger in legal terms is the setting of precedents.

s

sternus1 says...
well, you can smoke it, but mostly it's drunk from a shell on the equinox at midnight, there's fire and beating drums involved, too

gimme says...
Custard apples are pea sized on the tree in seQld at the moment. I'm still hand pollinating flowers

TMary says...
Achacha at Paddy's Market today.

Pictures - Click to enlarge
Picture: 1

MaryT says...
Jason I totally agree with you. It's not worth eating; there is so little flesh though I wouldn't throw them away. The flavour is ok but it's all seeds. At the moment there's lychee, longan, grapes, peaches, mangoes, mangosteen (expensive today) ...countless varieties of fruit that are scrumptious - why eat an achacha?

MaryT says...
Great marketing though, Jason. They used to play an ad at the cinema to make the achacha seem exciting. I've been eating yellow cherry guavas off my tree that are so much better; not to mention the figs.

Markmelb says...
Why did you buy a whole box? Maybe they were cheap and over ripe. Ive tasted some that were quite nice but dont like the large seed - hoping a ground planting alongside a Mundu goes ok - would like to put my Lucs there but only have one :)

Pictures - Click to enlarge
Picture: 1	Picture: 2

denise1 says...
I just ate a ripe yellow mangosteen (Garcinia xanthochymus) The main flesh was sour but the flesh around the seeds were quite nice.

Markmelb says...
David01 Yes the Sapodilla is still settling in as they do so im told for 3+ years but its flowering alot but waiting to see what it sets - then it needs to get thru winter with fruit which it didn't do 2y ago - i think i slightly burnt the roots last year so now only use slow release ferts.