This is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com.
Today we have another exciting episode for you.
Today I'm eating lunch in my garden so if you were wondering what I eat for lunch, or
how I eat lunch, this is what I do for lunch.
Come out to the backyard, sit amongst my beautiful backyard garden and I eat lunch while I'm
actually reading through seed catalogues.
In any case what we're going to talk about today is these guys.
Woah man these guys are like as big as my head and this is actually a small one.
This is known as a jackfruit.
The jackfruit can be up to a hundred pounds, it's probably the world's largest fruit.
I know many of you guys may have never seen this or heard of this or even tasted it before,
so actually I'm going to share with you guys what it is.
Now the jackfruit is a tropical fruit, it grows in the tropical environment.
It does not like when it's too cold, much like me I don't like when it gets too cold.
So it will not handle frost or anything like that.
It grows on a nice large tree and these guys, when you pick them, if you get them, I picked
this, I didn't grow this unfortunately.
This is actually grown in Mexico, they grow in also Florida.
Oftentimes you can get them at Asian markets or ethnic markets in your area.
Most standard, American supermarkets you'll never see a jackfruit because most people
don't know what they are.
It's kind of sad because once you taste it you're going to love it more than apples as
I do.
In any case it's kind of spiky on the outside, but it's not that hard and no this is not
the Durion which is even more spiky than this.
This has a much better flavor in my opinion.
So what you see is you see me already cut it up.
This is another one that I actually cut open.
When you're picking these you want to get one that's a little bit soft to the touch,
don't get them when they're green.
They should, if you smell the sealed fruit, it should smelly fruity and actually kind
of like bubblegum.
So when you cut it open there's going to be a nice stem in the middle that you can't eat
and then all the parts in the middle.
These little fibers actually are edible, but they don't really taste that good because
they're just fiber.
But what we're looking for, we're looking for these little pods, let me go ahead and
dig one out here for you guys.
We're looking for these little pods and what these pods are, we got to get these strings
that are kind of the connecting tissue that holds the pods into the fruit.
These pods are little seed carrying wessels, or vessels.
If we open this up as we will see inside, look at that, there's one little seed in each
little fruit pod.
Now the whole purpose of the fruit pod is to feed the seed the nutrients so that it
can actually grow up into a new tree.
And we're going to open this little membrane thing out and check it out.
There's a little seed coming right out.
Now one of the cool things I want to remind you guys is that you guys can take the seeds
out of the produce you buy from the store and grow them out.
Yes, you can do this.
I don't know what you're going to get, many plants may be true to seed and some may not
be, it doesn't mean if you're going to plant apple seeds you will get oranges, but you
might not get the exact same kind of apple and that's alright because part of gardening
for me is the fun.
It's like me being a kid and experimenting in the garden to see what I'm going to get
because as Forest Gump said "You never know what you're going to get” when you plant
a seed, wait no, he was talking about something else.
In any case, the reason that spawned this episode today is because I was actually eating
another one and this seed actually had already sprouted.
So now this one's sprouted already, it's starting to grow, so this to be is a volunteer and
I like to take my volunteers and actually plant them.
So I'm going to actually plant this is a nursery pot, with some good potting soil and let this
grow up and we'll see if we get jackfruit.
Actually just kidding.
In my climate here these jackfruits will grow during the summertime, I could probably bring
it inside, keep it alive during the winter, and keep bringing it out every summer.
They'll probably never produce because jackfruit trees get very tall before they even think
about producing, so I could grow this as a curiosity.
I encourage you guys to do that too, just because somebody says don't do it or it won't
work doesn't mean you can't do it or you can't try.
You could have, if you have a nice large building, or warehouse you can grow some jackfruit in
there, maybe it'll fruit and make fruit for you, but to me that's just a lot of extra
expended energy and work for something that may not work.
But nonetheless I'm going to try it and I have grown other tropical fruit trees before
and have given them to people.
So I've actually taken ice green bean trees to my friend in Florida and have him plant
them out there and past these trees on to people that maybe can take care of them.
Because I just love gardening and growing plants.
So I know what some of you guys are thinking this whole time talking about seeds.
John what does the fruit taste like man!
Well they have all different kinds of variety of jackfruit.
Some are more crunchy, some are more soft when they're ripe.
That being said, they should all be very sweet when they're ripe.
It's unfortunate that most jackfruit sold in commercial trade is not fully ripe because
they're picked too young.
Fully ripe jackfruits, literally, let me tell you this, you guys could smell it from like
1/10th of a football field away, let me tell you if the winds blowing your direction, there's
a ripe jackfruit downwind or whatever, you'll smell it.
And you'll know it.
That thing will just separate out the tree and drop and just be a bit blob because it
will be that soft and I've had these in Hawaii off the tree and they are absolutely delicious.
Now what these guys taste like is, god I love every bite.
What these guys taste like is like juicy fruit gum, I know all you guys out there probably
have had juicy fruit gum by Wrigley's right.
They got inspired by the jackfruit, not the other way around.
Jackfruit came first, Wrigley's juicy fruit gum came second.
So imagine eating fruit that tastes like gum.
Yes, this is my lunch.
I want to encourage you guys sometimes to have a fruit lunch, many days I'll have just
fruit for lunch, I won't eat anything else.
Fruit is very healthy for you, lots of anti-oxidants and when it tastes this good it's like you're
eating dessert every single bit.
Alright, now what we're going to do is we're going to take the jackfruit seeds, now I always
want to encourage you guys to do the best use of your seeds, whatever that may be.
So I could eat these seeds, actually people do eat these seeds, you can actually boil
them and salt them and eat them.
I've also actually dehydrated them and then pulverized them in the Vitamix to make them
edible in their raw state without cooking them.
But in most cases I like to sprout, germinate and grow my seeds into the full sized plants
because that is truly the best use in many cases in my opinion because then you can propagate
the gene pool and keep the genes running.
Now this granted will be mostly for fun because I don't think I'm every going to get a jackfruit
tree here.
But it's fun to see if I can get these guys to sprout and grow and take care of them because
then I can say I have a jackfruit tree in Vegas.
I bet nobody else does.
Alright, so super simple, super easy.
We got our premixed home-made potting soil here.
Mix that up myself and we're just going to go ahead and take a little one gallon container
here.
Load this guy up about that much.
We're just going to take and place our seeds in there man.
I am seeding these thickly, or densely in this container spacing them a little bit apart.
This is fine because one of the things is that fruit trees are very resilient.
So once these guys start to pop out I'm going to probably, I'll separate these guys out
and it'll be no problem because there won't be as much transplant shock as there would
be with small little baby vegetables.
Alright look at that, looks like little Easter eggs, now we just take some dirt, pile it
on top, gently tap it down a little bit, and finally don't forget to water.
So hopefully like me you're doing this or you're trying to transplant fruit trees, tropical
fruit trees in the summer time or spring time when it's nice and warm.
These guys will actually go into my greenhouse for a little bit of extra moisture and to
stay warm.
So hopefully they'll germinate and soon enough I'll have some jackfruit trees sprouting up
out of my one gallon pot.
I hope you guys enjoyed this episode learning more about the jackfruit and how to sprout
some seeds and grow some jackfruit trees for fun.
I want to encourage you no matter where you guys live to always take some of the seeds
out of some of the fruits you're eating and try to grow them and see what happens.
Hey, post a couple of videos about it and I may even check them out.
Also don't forget to eat fruit for lunch once in a while.
I enjoyed my lunch and hope you guy enjoyed this episode.
Once again my name is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com.
We'll see you next time, and remember keep on growing.