This is some of the fruit that I brought home to share with family and to extend the experience of my trip. Yeah, I’m finally able to take and post pics. 
Pineapples, red bananas, and cacao pod.
http://growingfruit.org/uploads/default/original/2X/a/a17136312568f796b320ad80e5941fd4426bd9ae.JPG
I love how pink this one is!
I took this one outside. Perspective is a bit off. Those coconuts in the rear are larger than they appear here. In front of them is a guanabana and a cacao pod. I don’t even know what the smaller fruits in foreground are. Anyone care to identify them for me?
We enjoyed the guanabana tonight.
5 Likes
another guava vote…smell them–if they’re ripe guavas, and you’ve eaten guava anything, you’ll recognize it…
I don’t think the small yellow ones are guavas. These are single seeded, about the size and shape of loquats, and have a sweet/sour somewhat passion fruit like taste.
But, hey, you got to see a little piece of my kitchen table and an even tinier slice of my immediate backyard. 
Although, I’ve forgotten whaat the yellow ones are - my head was swimming with information and new experiences that day - I have zero idea what that slightly larger green foreground fruit is. It’s not cylindrical, but has a sort of a lumpy shape to its circumference.
Beautiful. Be sure to re-plant the tops of the pineapples!!
Patty S.
1 Like
Of course I will! That was part of the reason for (uncomfortably) lugging those home. One of the reasons I chose that specific white/pink pineapple was that it had four extra offshoots growing from the base. That’s like getting five new plants in one!
1 Like
Ooooh loooks yummy Muddy. Now where are the pics of the backyard resort? 
1 Like
I’ll need a couple of full time grounds keepers before I have that resort. Oh, and maybe a free construction crew that will provide the also free materials. Until then, I haven’t found a way to take pics of what’s only in my dreams.
Is this from your trip to Puerto Rico?
Yes, indeed. All legally brought home and gladly presented to the Ag inspectors.
Don’t worry…In spite of my earlier post, I promise I’m not the fruit police, and I never suspected that you didn’t do the right thing. Besides, with there being no customs I wasn’t sure you had to declare such things…though it makes sense.
I hope you had a great trip!
Ha! Ha! I wasn’t thinking you were policing. There’s no customs, but there are ag transport restrictions that I’m happy to comply with, because imperfect though they may be, those inspections and restrictions are in place to protect our ag economy, and all of us from insects and plant diseases. My reply was more in case anyone wondered how I had brought those back with me.
I didn’t even consider bringing mangoes home because they are not allowed due to an insect that bores into their seeds.
hard to see from the pic, but they look like yellow jaboticabas
What’s the plan with the cacao pod? I volunteer to help sprout extra seeds ;-}
1 Like
My daughter’s plan is to hand process the seeds to fulfill her hope of eventually making her own cup of cocoa. I can probably convince her to save a few to try to sprout, but I don’t know if I could convince her to give them up. She worked very hard to pick that thing from high in the tree on a steep slope during a thunderstorm in a mountain rain forest. We did bring back and pot up a few cacao trees.
At one place we bought 2 cacao trees, a coffee tree, and a guava tree for a grand total of $11. 
Then we spent an evening addressing the indoor challenge of bare rooting them from the volcanic muck of their containers, thoroughly cleaning the plants, and prepping them for transport.
I was really glad that our walk-up apartment had its own laundry room that was an open-air patio with a laundry sink, hose, tiled floor, and floor drain. We still had to lug all that soil outside afterwards and find an appropriate place to deposit it.
Hey Diana, if you have any seed left over from the cacao id love some. They are only viable for a short time and hard to get fresh. We lost our cacao recently and are wanting to start another.
@amadioranch and @smatthew Guys, you know if it were up to me I’d pack a few up and send them right off to each of you. The glitch is that, out of everything we brought back, the cacao and coffee specifically belong to my daughter. They are the only things she brought home for herself. I’ll see if I can talk her out of just a few, but that pod is VERY precious to her. I even tried to find one online to buy myself, so that I could send you some, but didn’t have any luck. I think it’s interesting that coffee and cacao are the first “fruit” trees she’s trying to grow for herself. Talk about a challenge!
Now, if anyone wants to fund another trip there for me - say, in August or Jan - Feb, when I’d be glad to escape here - I’ll gladly attempt to find more pods to share. 
1 Like
Hahahaa I dont blame her for being possessive! Thats a very special treat right there. We LOVE the taste of the pulp. No worries…we just use the plants as ornamentals. Its no big deal.
Don’t worry about it. It’s fairly easy to get cacao seeds and/or pods from Hawaii or PR. Montoso gardens sells pods, plus a bunch of people on eBay sell seeds and pods. Just didn’t want them to go to waste. So she’s going to try and ferment the seeds, then process them into chocolate? I know I definitely want to hear the results of that experiment. I hear the fermentation is the hardest part to get right, especially in small batches.
good catch! the basal ones fruit bear fruits sooner than the crowns, apart from being easier to root
1 Like
