Babaco – planting, caring for and taste testing a rare fruit in the Papaya family

I'd read about this fruit and wanted to try it so I decided to grow it. It grew well, set heaps of fruit and I filmed myself trying the first fruit to ripen. Very shortly afterwards there was a problem with the plant but I stripped it and it recovered. It's currently setting more fruit and doing well.

Babaco is a naturally-occurring sterile hybrid of two species that produces only female flowers. This is great as I have a really good strain of pawpaw and I don't want pollution in that gene pool. Some more information if you're interested:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babaco

And before anyone asks, the price included postage.

For the curious gardeners out there those are sword beans - Canavalia gladiata - are growing to the left of the Babaco. These get to 30cm plus in length. It's my first time growing them and it's interesting so far. They young pods are really tasty and I have more investigating to do with the beans and larger pods. There's not a lot of information about them and some of it is contradictory.

To the right of the Babaco those are Fingerroot - Boesenbergia rotunda or Chinese Keys. It's more closely related to turmeric than ginger but they're all in the same family. Mild ginger flavour,

As for the downturn in the plant's health, for some reason I'm sure the removal of the first fruit somehow triggered a meltdown and die-back. I didn't notice it dropping off right away and if I didn't check to see if it had more ripe fruit I think I might have died on me. I took the fruit off the following afternoon as a bit of a hail Mary. It seems to have worked.

I don't think it was the heat. It didn't get really hot until after it had its issues and these guys are supposed to be able to handle temperatures in the mid 30s Celsius. We only got up to 38 after it had its problems. I'm not saying it wasn't heat-related but it's soldiered on well through even higher temperatures. It went downhill fast when it tried to die on me.

The wallabies are Pretty-faced wallabies, aka Blue Fliers/Whiptail wallabies.

Back in November the magpies were still coming for bales most days. The chicks spent quite a bit of time fishing for bugs in the dead tomato bushes over the weeks. I didn't want to move them as the chicks were honing their skills.

So that's my Babaco experience to date. Fingers crossed it thrives again and I get to try propagating it. I wonder if you could ship a plant as a cutting...probably. I shall have to find out.

Yes, I got a new hat. Well, two more of the same. The old one still finds itself in rotation. Maybe I should save it for when I'm working in the rain.

Cheers folks!

If you'd like to support the channel you can buy me a bale:
https://buymeacoffee.com/mybackyardyt

0:00 – Intro
1:07 – Planting March
1:45 – Update November
2:38 – Taste test
8:18 – It looks sick
9:37 – Removing all fruit
10:06 – Update
10:43 – Conclusion and Outro
11:28 – Wallabies
12:22 - Magpies

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