Finally, the underwhelming durian season in the farm has just ended. It has been a really bad season but the wrapping up of this season with these cream of the crop pickings has been a welcomed finale. The season culminated with these laggards from the best trees available at the farm; unfortunately only two trees. But the fruits are truly heavenly, rivalling that of Musang Kings (but, perhaps, not Black Thorn).
Having said that, I find Musang Kings unnecessarily over rated and rightfully vilified due to its highly commercialised and controversial status of being environmentally destructive by virtue of its mono cropping. That’s how we’ve come to commercially grow and eat seedless but tasteless bananas for a start – but that’s just ranting for another post. Biological diversity still rules in my opinion.
When it comes to personal taste and nuances in flavour, nothing beats that of the kampung varieties or even other more well known hybrid clones. We have only about 35 durian trees of about 30 years old at the farm. They are all not in the best of shapes and in dire need of being nursed back to life but they do bear really good fruits. I believe the returns in output quality would be tremendous in the next 3 years if they are well taken care of. As I won’t be using NPKs and am going the organic route, the conditioning and improvement takes time.
However, the baseline in taste and varieties we have is pretty good to start with. More than 80% of the fruits in the farm is good. However, the above selection dropped in a single day (from 3 trees) proved to be the best of the best. The first two on the left are really large olive green fruits with sparse thorns. The stems have a distinctive and conspicuous rounded knobby end. I’m not sure what clone is this, but the flesh is really thick, moist and creamy albeit, having large seeds. The flavour is simply out of this world. The next two at the middle are regular D24; pretty good themselves. The 4 fruits on the far right are all from the same tree, arguably D158 if I’m not mistaken. Better known as Kang Yao (Gan Yau) or Tangkai Panjang (literally translated to “Stem Long”), this almost perfectly spherical shape fruit is another best to look out for at the farm. The stems are undoubtedly and unusually long and thick in a straight almost perfect line like a cigar. The husk is thick and often difficult to open in a way that doesn’t give way along its seams.
Despite knowing these selected few types of durians which are certainly not kampung varieties, we have decided to sell all the durians from the farm at a fixed RM 18/kg – kampungs included. There are a lot more other cloned varieties which we are unsure of. Until we know what they are, going by a nominal fixed rate seems to be the safest bet for now.
