Oh, how I wish there was a real fruit market within a reasonable driving range. The closest one to me is in Chicago, about a 3-hour drive (with tolls
). Before the cost of gas + tolls became prohibitive (and before Covid) DW & I used to drive down there 1-2 times a year with our daughters, to buy fruit by the case. Those trips are unlikely to recur any time soon (if ever) unless we have other business in Chicago. Fortunately a local Oriental market has been making an effort to stock a few of the less-common fruits, such as Thai bananas, jackfruit, longans, and a surprisingly diverse selection of mangoes.
I'm still wondering if the red kiwis - that I read about over a decade ago - will ever make it into the U.S.
I may have a solution to your problem with the kiwis, depending on how desperate you are. I don't know of anybody who sells red kiwi fruit, but the seed people who had the giant limes I posted DO have seed for them. I DID end up biting the bullet and ordering the lime seed, and they DID, in fact, come. (
https://www.etsy.com/listing/649310...09:649310452&click_sum=22d32fb8&ref=related-4)
I have no idea if this is a kind of kiwi that you can grow outside in your climate (it's listed as dwarf so you could possibly grow it in a big pot indoors.) But it's the best I can do.
I suppose I am a bit spoiled, in that (in the days before COVID) I had the whole of NYC to get fruit from, and that included TWO Chinatowns rich in fruit stands and markets with their rather casual approach to fruit legality (i.e. lots of smuggled fruit which both widened the selection and kept prices low.) If you knew where to look, you could find some really astonishing things, like bullocks heart (like a cherimoya or custard apple, but red), fresh soursop (including one lucky find I HAD to save the seed of, as it was that rarest of things, a soursop that needed no sugar to be palatable.). wong pei (looks a little like a longan but is actually a citrus relative, with a sort of sweet sour resinous taste. unshelled pine nuts (once) some sort of alternate breed of longan (much smaller and much sweeter) at an organic market (I almost liked it, and I HATE longans [I think they taste moldy] rambutan, lian wu (rose apple) and so on.
There are some I am so used to I don't even consider them as exotic fruit anymore, like key limes.
Even with that, AND now, access to an H-mart (which still surprises me from time to time with a fruit I haven't seen before) there have been elusive ones. There's a different kind of lian wu I found once at my local Chinese market, smaller, narrower, redder, and much stronger flavored (while Lian Wu is pretty and crunchy the actual flavor can be described as heavily watered down fresh strawberry juice.) Alas, unlike the normal ones, none of those had any "seeds" (actually polyembryonic masses) for me to plant. And, despite seeing signs advertising it, I haven't found salak (snakefruit) yet.
You mention you market having Jackfruit. I actually have a tip for buying that. When you buy a chunk (I assume you are only buying chunks, as a whole jackfruit is so enormous I can't imagine ANYONE being able to finish one before it spoiled) try and get a piece where the arils (the fleshy bit you are actually eating) are orange, instead of yellow. Those tend to be the sweetest (they show up more or less randomly).
I can see where you are coming from. If I was in your place, I probably WOULD plan to visit Chicago pretty often, but this has less to do with finding fruit and more to do with the fact that, if I lived anywhere within driving distance of Chicago, I become obsessed with trying to try every Italian Beef sandwich in the city!
Oh and I have some tips on how to pick good blood oranges and ugli fruit, if anyone ever needs that information.
www.theeasygarden.com
Post#26 about lemons
