Many know how big of a difference there is in a home grown pear and those purchased in the store. Many of my pears are 100% better. My tomatoes are certainly 100% better. I only wish i could grow my own bananas like the blue types they grow in asia and hawaii that allegedly have a vanilla flavor according to facebook posts
The vast array of fresh apples can be very different from store bought. The red delicious really is delicious and does not taste like the styrofoam tasting version from the store. This begs the question of why do we eat so much food from the store when there are so many great oppurtunities? Im looking forward to some clarks crabbapple, roxbury russet, red cinnamon this year! I will likely hang out with @39thparallel this weekend eating fresh pawpaw. Cant even find many of these things in the store! Who has ever had a fresh delicious fig? Juneberries? Homegrown blackberries, raspberries or strawberries? Sure not just every fruit is better. When it comes to strawberries @ross has a nice patch here of Mara Des Bois Strawberries. If you have not tried those or earliglow among others give them a try.
I have never seen a banana as blue as the one in the facebook post. Maybe you have or maybe that was just altered like almost all digital video and pictures have been for the last 20 years. That is one of the reasons video or photographs in the day of AI mean very little because you cannot count on what your seeing to be true. Once photography went to digital it all changed because digital photography by its very definition is altered. The only thing we can count on is what we grow and the things we document extensively from multiple sources like we do on this forum. The forum generates no revenue or has any bias in altering information. That said store bought food is growing ever increasingly worse every day. Im a strong beleiver in self reliance because who will take better care of you than you?
In a dollar market type store and the girls brought over a bag of small Fujis. They were hard as a rock and not well colored. So I went back with them to find a better bag. But they were all that way. Picked to early I thought.
They were not all that sweet or juicy as I expected. But the girls killed them anyway.
Ice Cream(blue java) bananas are yellow at ripeness. We had them in Florida. In truth they were green with a bluish blush when green. Very custardy taste. That was a long time ago. Maybe the newer ones are improved.
Oh also that blue java photo you posted is highly photoshopped. The actual ones have a slight blueāish-green tint to them. Like how a really happy tomato plant sometimes have the shining blue-green tint to the leaves when theyāre super happy.
One thing youāre missing out on are Charlotte strawberries. Theyāre the upgraded mara des bois with bigger berries and even sweeter flavor if you ask me. To me, theyāre what strawberries used to taste like back in the 90ās before things changed somehow. I grow both but if i had to keep one, Iād only keep Charlotte out of all my varieties and i grew every variety i could get my hands on this year.
Ruby supreme pink Guava as well
I killed over 10 plants and lost over a thousand dollars on these but Iāll still attempt them. I have 1 plant thatās going strong right now.
Also home grown passion fruit thatās well taken care of. I grew purple possum, red rover, and 1 other one i canāt remember last year in Colorado. Passionfruit and Ruby supreme guava along with shiranui Citrus, Mahachanok Mango and lemon zest Mango will be the reason why Iām getting a very expensive greenhouse temporarily for the winter this year. I am determined as heck to keep them alive after eating the fruit.
Here is THE Mahachanok Mango i had that made me buy a tree.
Fresh blueberries every morning without pesticides and the need to wash them before eating them multiplied by picking them with your loved ones could never compare to grocery store blueberries.
Did I mention Passionfruit and mangos? Iām growing everything i love because thereās no other way to be able to give my daughter the same food experience without having to pay hundreds of dollars for each fruit item and thatās a gamble because some of the growers donāt always have time to commit to their fruits to keep them happy and top flavored. And babying the heāll out of them definitely helps with flavor.
I grew these melons a few years ago that made it so i couldnāt eat any other melons anymore as well. I share everything with my dogs too especially my girl dog, Rhea. She LOVES fruits and veggies.
Also once upon a time, i got the hookups when it came to fruit and veggie freebies i had a friend that would deliver me stuff that the store deemed ātrashā and was going to their away. Literally they looked amazing still so he would donate it to his friends to save some.
I always wondered , why people donāt bother to use those colour adjustment filters with just a bit more feeling (or nuance or whatever you may call it) to make those pictures just a bit more believable - like the mailing catalogues from around 20 years ago. You know, making the blue just a bit different on the pulp and on the rindā¦ or in YouTube videos where the hands holding the fruit are just as tweaked into magenta as the fruit theyāre holding. At least for the stuff that is real to a degree devaluing it as 100% scam this way . And then thereās other stuff, like some of my acquaintances re-posted āphotosā of cyan-blue apples with perfectly white flesh (which is perfectly normal) but obviously the appleās skin was spray painted blue - and asking with all seriousness where they could get those Smurf aplles.
I konw that some of that stuff does have some grain of truth, like pineaple/banana tasting apples, or the custard tasting bananas. Iām even sure that a Red Delicious would look like a Diamond apple at high altitudes. But the visualsā¦We did that tweaking crap (both digital and paint) at school to learn some skills while pranking friends as a bonus. Now Iām amazed and keep wondering if those videos get views in 6-7 digit numbers as comedy, because we(count me in) canāt look away orā¦
Other than that, I think most of us miss out on tomatoes, pears and apples which are like a homeopathic medicine.
I will never forget my friendās face lighting up in wonder when she bit into my home-grown Chojuro after only ever eating a couple store bought nashi pears, which frankly taste like watery kohlrabi minus the brassica aftertasteā¦
I canāt eat store apples without severely cutting away the skin because Iām allergic to whatever they put onto it and it wonāt wash away with vinegar or even bleach.
Also store bought peaches, plums, Nectarines and cherries make my mouth itch as well. I have to cut off half of it to be able to eat them without too many allergic affects but home grown doesnāt give me issues. Iāve concluded that itās the pesticides and not the fruit itself that Iām allergic to because Iāve grown my own peaches and donāt have issues with them but the same variety from the store will make my want to claw my ears out.
Our dog is our QA tester. If he spits out a carrot or an apple, it goes to compost.
Pears are problematic. They are his Holy Grail of fruit and if it has a whiff of pear, he will eat it - tired, rubbery or rotten - doesnāt matter.
I am glad we have all those EU regulations (and our own) in place. In this sense buying fruit&veg from the stores here is safer than home-growersā markets.
I have heard folks say Java Bananas have a vanilla taste. I do not recall it. Maybe grown a different way they can. I know Orincos(my favorite) have a distinct apple taste.
I watched Omnivore on AppleTV a few weeks agoā¦they had a nice long segment on bananas. I think by the 50s the whole world got hooked on bananas. Supposedly they were deliciousā¦ but that cultivar of banana is mostly gone (Gros Michel) ā¦ and the ones we have now are no where near the flavor. (supposedly Cavendish is getting hit hard with disease now and may be gone or very expensive soon).
There are over 1,500 varieties of bananas, and yet most of us have only tasted one. strange huh?
The fad dieters are missing outā¦ 400 varieties of oranges, 1000 varieties of mango, 3000 varieties of pears, 2000 varieties of plums, 2000 varieties of peachesā¦and on and on and on.
This is actually a bit of a myth, the Gros Michel (Big Mike, which is the direct translation, has recently taken on a different meaning so I guess we have to stick with French) tastes only very slightly better than a Cavendish, still a very inferior banana to those in the know. It also didnāt taste EXACTLY like banana flavored candy which is another myth going around
hereās a very non-sensationalist tasting from someone who has eaten a lot of banana varieties
Not trying to argue at allā¦ theres no telling how much better or worse things were 70-170 years ago during the peak of the Gros Michelā¦ possibly better soil or climate?
Maybe butā¦
heres a newer tastingā¦ and he says āCavendish is not as good as Gros Michelā
I agree 100%, thatās why I said itās slightly better. Still, if you ask people that know about bananas (like the people on these forums that know about apples or blackberries or whatever) they would say gros Michel isnāt worth the stomach space compared to the good ones
I imagine that a tree ripened banana may be better than the antifreeze colored green ones that get harvested to make the journey to my store in WV. Maybe thats not how it works with bananasā¦ i do know that i have bought bananas that were so green that it took most of the week to ripen. I know some folks that love the taste of the green ones the mostā¦weird. I also know folks that like them full of black spots and mushy.
Personally i dont like Fyffesā¦ and i think Dole tastes betterā¦its probably in my head.
I read yesterdayā¦that if you leave the bananas on the main stem that they ripen fasterā¦ if you individualize them they ripen slowerā¦ no clue if thats true or notā¦and ive never read that or paid attention.
but if i had to keep one, Iād only keep Charlotte out of all my varieties and i grew every variety i could get my hands on this year.
Iām growing everything i love because thereās no other way to be able to give my daughter the same food experience without having to pay hundreds of dollars for each fruit item and thatās a gamble because some of the growers donāt always have time to commit to their fruits to keep them happy and top flavored. And babying the heāll out of them definitely helps with flavor.
especially my girl dog, Rhea. She LOVES fruits and veggies.
