Summer Fruit Tasting: Highly Regarded Figs, Grapes, Melons & Pomegranate

Hey guys, it's Ross. We have a really awesome summer harvest of fruits in front of me. I want to talk about some of these things very briefly. We're going to go over the figs in quite detail, I think, because I have a number of varieties here, so stay tuned for that. We also have a musk melon here. This is a variety called Sarah's Choice. We've been harvesting melons now over the last week or so. They're very, very good. This one I got a full slip. It didn't split on me. What we're going to do actually is cover the melons, I think, in a separate video. I have a couple videos probably on these melons that are going to come out over the next few weeks, so stay tuned for that. I also have the last of my grape harvest. We had two varieties this year. I think Mars is the black grape, and I think it's Hemrod is the white grape here. They are, without a doubt, so, so good. They're incredible. They're almost spotless. There's nothing wrong with them. They're like a perfect—all of them have been perfect. I sort of talked about why that is this year, because we bagged them. We had bagged the grape clusters with some wax paper bags, which kept out the black rot, and I have a separate video on these grapes, but it just goes to show you, you know, you can grow grapes in this climate, in a humid place in the Philadelphia area, to pretty much perfection without any spraying. I thought that was amazing. We also have my first homegrown pomegranate, and it's very sad looking. Very sad, because the birds got at it. I don't even think it's ripe just yet, but the birds really have been devouring everything. I've been struggling to grow fruit this year, guys. You know, growing fruit's not easy, and there's a lot of channels out there, a lot of people maybe that you guys watch or look up to, and everything's great and rosy, but not everything is. You know, there's a lot of challenges to growing fruit, and for me, at least this year, I've been struggling a lot with frost, late frosts. We had two, and then also I've been struggling with the birds this year really heavily. They've really—there's a particular bird called the cat bird that is kind of newer to my yard over the last couple of years, and this bird is ferocious, vicious, steals everything, eats everything. It doesn't matter what it is. They're extremely difficult to get rid of. They're not afraid of me. We did a separate video on protecting your fruits and the crops that you grow from birds, and I mentioned in that video, you really should have about two or three or four methods of protection from birds, and I, for the most part, so far have been relatively unsuccessful, although it hasn't been all that much time since we've really put a lot of effort into protecting the figs. I have some nets over top of them, and if there's any gaps in the nets, underneath the nets, on the side of the nets, in the middle of the nets, wherever a gap is, the birds are going to get in there, and they're going to learn how to navigate through the nets, and they're still getting my figs. Although I have really quite a selection of figs that I want to share with you guys today, it just—I would have had other varieties to even add to this, and I would be eating some really high-quality fruit right now. We had a lot of rain prior to about this last week, and we had a nice dry week, which was great, and also the temperatures, even though today's really hot, it's, I think, at least 90. I'm sweating my brains out here, but it's also—it's been—normally, it's been dropping down over this last week in like the 80s, which is probably the best, in my mind, for ripening figs, somewhere in the 80s for fruit quality, and it's been a bit dry, not necessarily dry humidity-wise, but dry as in no rain, and as a result, these figs were really looking pretty good. I had some—I had a Black Madeira. I could have added to this. I had some Campanuri. I could have added to this comparison here. I had some Coldenon Blanca Negra. I could have added to this. Maybe there's one or two other varieties that are not necessarily all that important, but the point is is that I have a really nice selection, but it's still—it could be better, and although I'm really happy with what I have here, we've had some struggles, so for me this year, for most of this year, I'm just happy to have what I have, you know. I think that there's just certain years, certain things that go on in your life, and it's better, I think, to appreciate what you got than not, so I'm actually very excited, although I've been pretty much very realistic with you guys just now. I'm very excited to try these varieties here and eat these figs. This is one of my first really super good treats of the year of the figs, so I have here a variety called Sucrette. It's got so much honey in it right now that the honey's leaking out of the sides, and of course at the eye it's really solidified. It's a great fig here. It's one of my best, one of my favorite figs that I recommend. Here's an LSU Tiger, and we'll get into all of these in some detail. I'm going to taste them all. LSU Tiger reminds me—now that I've had myself—I had a really good piece of fruit yesterday. It's a variety called Violette de Marseille, and that one's from Thierry, and I thought it was a black Celeste, but I think it might actually be a blue Celeste, which was quite surprising to me when I tasted it yesterday, but when I look at LSU Tiger compared to that Violette de Marseille, I really get the thought that the LSU Tiger, because it is an improved Celeste, right? LSU had bred a bunch of figs using Celeste in the parentage. I have a feeling that it really does remind me that LSU Tiger is like a larger, maybe slightly more productive, much more vigorous blue Celeste, which is—even the flavor is rather similar. This here is a fig called Del's Hermitons. I hope it's—oh man, that looks great. This is, in my opinion, a replacement potentially for Black Madeira. It is a replacement for Black Madeira. This year, I'm not going to be growing Black Madeira. Here is a Col de Dame Grease, so the gray Col de Dame. That looks amazing. Here I have a Verdino Del Norde, which is slightly dried, not perfectly dried, but this one has amazing drying capabilities. Oh, that also looks like pure jam. And then I have a new one here that I don't—it may have fermented on me, unfortunately, but this one's called Tolosa, and I don't really expect anything from this, but I do want to talk about it for a good reason. Yeah, not fermented, but it's not ripe just yet. But what we do have—unfortunately, I'm getting attacked by mosquitoes. Just living in human climates, man, it's just a challenge. But we have Italian 258 here. We have Copol Kurt Negra. We have LSU Tiger and Sucrette, and I want to show you each individual variety right now. Sucrette is a really, really good one. I'm going to zoom in for you guys as well on this whole thing. And Sucrette I really like because it does so well in the humidity here, and it's got great flavor. When it is grown in a humid climate, you see on the backside on the skin, it's black. It has these black spots on it. That's because the sugar spots develop and become more pronounced in a humid climate. So you end up just getting more of these sugar spots on particular varieties. Usually it's on honey figs or lighter colored, lighter skinned figs. You'll see the sugar spots. But overall, this has a pretty decent berry flavor. Not the most intense. A very good texture. It's very thick and dense. We'll talk about that thick and dense texture in a minute. But it also dries pretty well here on the tree. And if it wasn't for the birds even getting underneath the net, I would have let this fig hang more on the tree to actually continue and dry up for me. Here is LSU Tiger. And as I mentioned, LSU Tiger is basically very similar to a Blue Celeste. It's got a similar shape. The exterior also is blue. Really gets a purplish blue color to it. The flavor is a lot like Azores Dark. It's quite fruity. It's a fruity berry flavor with notes of Concord grape. And I actually have my Mars grape here, which basically is a Concord grape styled grape. Although obviously not a Concord grape. It actually has no seeds. This is a really incredible variety, by the way. And it really does, in my opinion, resemble a Concord grape. So I get notes of this, this grape here, in LSU Tiger for sure. Here is Dell's Hermitons, which normally has a ton of syrup in it. For those of you guys who love syrup in your figs, very liquidy. A lot like Black Madeira. And the flavor is a lot like Black Madeira. It's a late fig. You can see the exterior here is yellow though. And I forget what color this turns as it ripens further. Because this is ripe, but it's not perfectly ripe, I guess, to the most extreme of the flavor. But it's still very good, I'm sure. Here is a Kapolkurt Negra. And it's not really all that Negra for me. It's not really all that black. The skin, if you can see the backside, it's getting the sugar spots like Sucrette. It also is starting to turn black. There is some of that pigmentation turning. But here this fig I don't find is really all that black. I don't know why. Climate, age, potassium, one of those three. And then here is the interior. It's very dense, which is really why I love this fig. Reminds me a lot of Sucrette, really. We'll compare them side by side here in just a minute. But I don't like necessarily that fig here in this climate. It just doesn't perform nearly as well. Here's Italian 258. Not perfectly ripe. But again, with the birds having put the nets up yesterday, and the nets not really doing a whole lot, I'm still very worried about my crop of figs. So we did a harvest. Let me change my, there we go. I can see the lens now. I can see what you guys are seeing better now. So that's Italian 258. Very similar in flavor to Black Windira. Here we go. Here is probably the best fig on this plate here, on this table, in this tasting. This is Koldadam Grease. The Koldadams are the best figs. I'm sorry. There's no, there's no debating that. I don't care what you guys think. You can tell it's grease because it's sort of gray on the backside, or red, or some people call it Koldadam Roja. It's the same thing as the grease version. Blanc, Noir, and Grease, they all taste the same for the most part. The amazingness of this fig is not necessarily the flavor, although the flavor is really good. It's that this is very dense, almost like pancake batter. It's a different consistency than jammy. I wouldn't even necessarily call it jam. You can't create jam like this. It's amazing. And then we also have here Verdino Del Nord, the smallest by far of the varieties here. And I don't know how much this weighs, almost nothing, but this is a very intensely jammy, dense, great tasting fig that has the most amazing drying capabilities. This one is basically semi-dried. And again, I could leave this on the tree. It'll dry up on the tree here. Even in light rain or pretty good amounts of rain, I've noticed last year, this fig still continues to dry. What you can also do is pick it a little bit early and bring it inside and it'll dry up on the counter, which is the most amazing, it's just the most amazing variety. And the fact it's so small really allows it to do that. The larger the variety, oh, you know what? What happened here? Oh, I have to zoom out for you guys. But the smaller the variety is, we just have issues with larger figs and our humidity. It just creates more issues. Usually there's more cracking, there's more splitting, they don't shed rain as well. The smaller varieties are just king here. So I purposely look for smaller varieties. It just so happens that really some of the smallest varieties I have also dry extremely well on the tree. And that is usually because there's almost no cracking in it ever. It never splits. And the skin is usually thick enough to allow it to dry on the tree. And it holds well on the tree. Sometimes figs will fall off and they have to have a good holding ability on the tree. So yeah, for me, that's the best performing fig out of any of them right here. But let's try some of these. I also have Tulosa, which is not perfectly ripe, as Thierry has mentioned in his posts, because he's the one who found this variety. It takes a few years for this one to mature. I definitely concur. But you can tell there's some potential in this fig. Let's try it actually right now. This is probably the worst fig of the bunch by far. Yeah, it is actually spoiled. So I'm not even going to bother. But for me, it actually has the most, has a very interesting consistency. A lot that I find in like a Koldedom. It's got like a synconium that's similar to that. If that makes any sense. The skin reminds me of it in a way. We'll have to get more into that as it matures. But I have really high hopes for it because it is a smaller variety. It seems to do well in the rain. It is a heavy producer. It's a vast grower. And the flavor should be out of this world when it does mature. So we'll see. Let's try to go from the worst to the best. So we had Tulosa. Here's Italian 258, which I think is actually going to be the worst of the rest of these. Reason being is that it's just not ripe. Still very good, but it needs, it still has some like some of that sap in it, some of that latex. So it needs another, honestly, if I could let it hang for another five days on the tree, holy crap, would this have been good? It really loses some of that acidity that I think in a way kind of mellows out when it gets a bit more sweet. It would have sweetened up, obviously. It would have lost the sap flavor that's in here. Overall, still a very good fig. However, it does split. The next one I imagine might be somewhere between the Dell's Hermitons, the Sucrette, and the LSU Tiger. So let's just compare them all. I'll say that, you know what, let's not do that. We just tried the black, you know, an Italian 258, which is very similar to Black Madeira in terms of flavor. So let's try the Dell's Hermitons and see if I'm right. Yeah. Somewhat similar. Again, not as ripe. Still needs to intensify a little bit on the tree, but better than that Italian 258. And yeah, it's pretty good. I can't really say too much about it definitively right now because it's just not perfectly ripe. So it's a bit of a shame, but it's a good fig. And it ripens late. So for my money, it tastes similar to Italian 258, but it performs better. The rain doesn't bother it for the most part. It doesn't split. It's got good rain resistance in general. And then also, it doesn't seem to nearly need to hang on the tree nearly as long either. So for me, it just seems like a winner. I'm going to eat more of these Dell's Hermitons figs than I would a Black Madeira. And I do want to plant one of these in the ground just to see what would happen underneath my low tunnels, obviously, in the spring. Let's try Sucrette and then we'll try the Kapolkirte Negra. Very good. It's got a lot of sugar in it. It's a very sweet fig. And Sucrette means, I think, sweetener or something or sugar. It means sugar in French. So it is very sweet. Not a whole lot of acidity. Good texture. It's an elegant fig. It really is exquisite in my opinion. It does have a little bit of that Concord note grape in there that LSU Tiger does. And it's, you know, it's like a reasonable moderate berry flavor in there. But that one's kind of mostly sweet. Not the best, I bet. All right, let's try the LSU Tiger now because it's pretty much like a Concord grape, as I said with Sucrette. Yeah, this one's closer to a Concord grape because it's got some more of that acidity to it and more of that berry flavor. Very good. And again, it really does remind me of that Violette de Marseille, but it's bigger. Here is my Mars grape. Let's try that. Yeah, definitely has notes of this in it. By the way, these grapes are insanely good and I would argue this Mars grape is probably better than half of the figs here I'm eating. So I probably prefer this grape. It's just, it's so good, guys. It has a slip skin, which makes it amazing. You could literally just push out the pulp so when you bite into it, the pulp breaks loose from the skin in your mouth and you're left with the pulp separate from the skin. And they both have a different flavor and it gives you an interesting, better eating experience, in my opinion. It's got like the perfect acidity, perfect sweetness. I mean, it's just great. It has a great flavor, guys. Really an awesome grape flavor, too. All right, let's try the Kapol Kurt Negra. This one I imagine is probably going to be the third best out here. Yeah. Yeah, that's really good. It's getting to that perfect consistency that some of these others so far just have not been able to get to. It's also very sweet, Concord grape flavored, like a good amount of berry flavor as well. For my money, because Kapol Kurt Negra doesn't taste or doesn't perform all that well here, I would rather just have an LSU Tiger. I mean, the difference in flavor is not that big, but the difference in how they perform is huge. I'd also rather have Villete Marseille. I have to get a perfectly ripe LSU Tiger to compare side by side of that Villete Marseille because that Villete Marseille is a really good fig. So is this, though. So, you know, that one's even got a little bit, it's approaching to get that figgy flavor as well that you might find as they start to ripen further and start to dry up a little bit. All right, let's try the Verdino Del Norte because I think this one's going to be the second best fig, if you can believe it. One bite, though. Yeah, it's very good. This one's like if Smith and Koldedom had a baby, but it's very small. It's just so good. You know what? I want to get a photo of this before I eat it. Save that one just a minute, but it's so good, guys. I promise. All right, Koldedom, the best of the bunch. Yeah, it's good, but believe it or not, it's not as thick as it normally is. Maybe it's just this side of the fig. It's still very good, but I actually think the Verdino Del Norte is better. It's a little watered down, still very, very good. I'm not getting that pancake fatter texture that I normally get, so sometimes you got to get them perfect. Sometimes you got to have the perfect weather to really get that super thickness to them. Maybe it's the other side here that's not necessarily as good. Yeah, it's just this fig, for whatever reason, isn't as thick as it normally is. You know, figs vary quite a bit, guys. So the last thing I want to try here is actually this pomegranate, and then I'll let you guys go. This is a Sambar pomegranate. I wonder if it's ripe. Nope, not ripe, but there's the inside of this beauty. Let's show it to you guys. This little brain shot of a Sambar pomegranate. It is the earliest soft-seeded palm, therefore a really good choice for people in this climate. I don't know how much more time this needs, to be completely honest, but the arrows are red, dark red. I don't know. It's a small one, and I don't know if that's just because it hasn't had time to develop as the birds got after this and took it off there too soon. I really don't know, but it has no sweetness, no acidity, very little juice. Visually, it looks ready. I don't know. It's so strange, but that's a shame that the birds here are just savages. I don't know anyone who likes birds that actually grows fruit. You could probably do without them. All right, guys. I hope you enjoyed this little video here. This was a lot of fruit. The green variety here, let's try this one real quick because I know someone's going to ask. Very sweet, chalky, very good. A little bit of acidity, a little bit of tannin in there, but for my money, it's really difficult to beat this Mars grape. Easily the best grapes I've ever had. Obviously, they're homegrown, superior varieties, way better than those moondrop grapes, and you can really let them hang on the tree for an extended period of time, and they'll start to really sweeten up. So thank you guys here so much for watching this one. Hit that subscribe button. You guys got this far. Hit that subscribe button for me. We'll see you guys soon, all right? Take care and stay safe out there. Hope everybody's happy and healthy.