Watermelon juice left out in the sun for a week, but with less flavor.
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Stinky?
Not much smell at all. Aside from the insipid flavor, The big problem for a lot of people are the skin segments which are tougher than they appear. And the latex…
Well mine ended up falling off before ripe. Until next year…
A few weeks ago at Jerry Lehman’s orchard I tasted Che and they were pretty good. Really grainy/gritty. I didn’t detect a watermelon flavor and I can’t remember what I felt they tasted like.
Jerry is in Terre Haute, IN. Zone 5b and 6a are represented there in pockets all in that area. His Che was probably 10’ across and nearly as tall. It was loaded with fruit.
At Red Fern Farm here in zone 5b they have several/many Cornus kousa seedlings. The fruit looks almost identical. While I don’t remember that flavor much either, there wasn’t much difference.
Both I remember thinking to myself after moments of chewing and releasing the flavor before I had an opinion, ‘these are pretty good.’
Dax
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I tasted one that was underripe. It did taste like warm runny watermelon slime inside a fig-raspberry textured package. And like figs, the stem scar leaked a drop of latex sap due to the underripeness. I wish I could try a fully developed one dead-ripe to see if there’s any improvement. I could see myself snacking on these, but am not sure if they’ll be successful at my mountain property’s 1600 foot above sea level elevation. And I’m not sure they’re worth the limited space.
I have some osage orange whips I grew from local seed finally getting bigger. I might graft this year, if I have the time and energy, but not a high priority.
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am tempted to grow one or two myself…
while also worried about our elevation, more worried about our oven-hot summers. Have been searching online for anybody posting weblogs about growing it in vegas, but so far none.
I finally ate my first Che fruit, and… mehhh. Nothing all that special. It may have been a little under ripe, so I think I’ll give the tree one more year, but I’m not expecting too much. The flavor was okay, kind of raspberry and watermelon-like, but there’s just not a whole lot to it.
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I had more or less the same experience and reaction as SMC, which is to say I had my first taste this year and they were very minimally appealing. I did pick up on the watermelon flavor. I think if I were walking by a tree loaded in ripe fruit I might eat one or two but no more, and I probably wouldn’t go more than two or three steps out of my way. I don’t think there’s anything really bad about the taste; they’re just very, very minimally good. However, I’ll add that it’s a very pretty little tree, even late in the year when a lot of other trees don’t look as nice, and I think it will be even more ornamental as my tree matures further and sets more fruit. It’s really one of the prettiest, if not the prettiest edible ornamental I’ve planted, apparently without even minor pest or disease issues. But if I didn’t care about the novelty or the ornamental value at all (i.e. if I only cared about eating the fruit) and if I didn’t already have one and if I had unlimited space and if someone had given me a free tree to plant, I might or might not go to the trouble of planting it. Mine is about 10’ tall now and maybe close to that in diameter/spread, and this is the first year it didn’t abort all its fruit. It probably matured around 100 fruits this year.
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thanks for the assessments, everyone!
Matt,
My Che grafts failed over several months due to incompatability. I’m not giving up yet just going to try some different tricks. Wild Osage orange is like wild callery pear each and everyone is genetically unique and at times painfully tricky to work with. These experiments may help you Che, mulberry, osage orange, fig grafting
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you know, @castanea – i couldn’t help but click the ‘like’ button even though totally aware it is a fruit tree you don’t like and advising everybody not to have 
perhaps it is not good-eating, but the fruit and the tree sure looks pretty!
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It is a surprisingly tough tree and I respect that. It handles heat and drought very well. It is a nice ornamental as long as you don’t need to clean up the fruit. But you do not want it on its own roots because the older it gets the more sprouts it will throw up and all of those sprouts have nasty thorns…
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I remember what I thought the Che I tasted reminded me of: mulberry. I can’t tell anyone how intensely mulberry, but that is what I detected.
Dax
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What time of year did yours ripen?
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This is only the first year my tree fruited, so I wouldn’t be surprised if a more mature tree would ripen its fruit over a somewhat longer season, but it seems like my tree started ripening fruit sometime around the beginning or middle of September and continued until just the last few days.
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castanea - those Che fruits look much larger than those my tree makes… or, maybe the hand is just very small!
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I just came cross some pictures , someone is selling the fruits. I want to ask If this is type of Che?
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Not Che. But I’m not sure what it is.