The Rarest Fruits You've Ever Seen

This is a spice that when you eat it, it makes your mouth go numb. Here at Murray Family Farms, we have over 3,000 varieties of fruits. These are the donut peaches. Chocolate pudding fruit. Beautiful star fruit. It looks like a star. My personal interest is rare and exotic fruits. This though is something very, very rare. Like a cherry and a blueberry. We haven't started looking at some weird stuff because I got really weird stuff. I'm Stephen Murray and this is my seed story. So we're in one of the biggest agricultural regions on earth. And it's especially rich in crop diversity because it is warm enough that we don't get that many frosts, but it's cold enough that we could still grow all the stone fruit. So these are cherims. And cherims are new cherry plum crosses. So they take a cherry and a plum and they cross them together to make a cherim. Yeah, almost there. My personal interest is rare and exotic fruits. I've been a member of the California Rare Fruit Growers since I was 11 years old. So I've been collecting fruit now for almost 30 years. So these are the Kiowa giant blackberries and they are huge. But like, look at the size of these things. Very tasty. Very spiny. Big, big blackberry. They're really good. In 1989, my dad traded his house for the first 20 acres of farmland. That same year, someone knocked on the door and they asked if they could plant a cherry tree nursery and then pay my dad in cherry trees. And then three years later, our cherries ripened a month earlier than any other cherries in the U.S. So all the big cherry packing houses wanted to come through here and also grow early season cherries. We were able to go from having no farmland to 319 acres. Everywhere you look on the farm, there's different crops. There's 3,000 different varieties of things here. This is called the pink lemonade blueberry. So you look at these, these are ripe now. Shouldn't a blueberry have to be blue? Not these. Another kind of blueberry. Everything that we do is all by hand. Because we have so many varieties, that you can't have an everything machine that's going to pick everything. So we pick everything by hand, we harvest by hand. So these are really, really exciting grape varieties that were developed by the International Fruit Genetics. And we are the only farm that has these. And these green grapes have a really cool, strong muscat flavor. A nice, crisp, sweet kind of candy flavor. And we have all of this really awesome stuff that we want to bring from our farm directly to you. We have our Big Red Barn store, which is the physical store itself and all of the retail items and the beverages, the dry goods. So inside the store, we have a bakery and restaurant where we make all of our own food items. And we also make jams and jellies there. The jars of honey and other things and all of our own fruit. You're not just competing with the grocery store, you know, you have to give them something that they can't get in the grocery store. And this is a truly a family business. We grow multiple varieties of everything because for us, we're selling to the public. And we want to have as long of a season as possible so we can sell the fruit as long as possible in the market. So here we have two selections of mulberries. So on this side, this is a white chateaute mulberry. Which tastes like cantaloupe. They're really, really good. Really sweet. This is a black Persian mulberry. Wow, they taste nothing alike. So this is really, really sweet and sour. Really full flavor. And this one is just pure sweet cantaloupe-like flavor. It's what happens when you have hundreds and hundreds of varieties. You're going to find all kinds of unique flavors that you didn't even realize you're missing. These are the donut peaches. The variety is originally from China. So they're very thin. They're flat. They're very sweet. They're good. But they're called donut peach. This isn't too weird yet, but we'll look at some stuff that's really weird. So this fruit here, this is the chocolate pudding fruit. That tastes really good. This is one of the rare fruits I'm growing. Chocolate pudding fruit. All of these around it are the same species. So these are all chocolate pudding fruits or black sapotes. This is the fruit when they're not quite mature, but it's got these, you know, black pulp and seeds. A lot of times it doesn't taste like what they say it tastes like, but I think it tastes like chocolate pudding. Yeah, $25 a fruit. There's no one else that grows it. You know, if you want it, this is the only ones that exist. So chocolate pudding fruit. Tastes like chocolate pudding. One kind of cool one is over here. We have some beautiful star fruit. Look at them. So these are star fruits. It looks like a star. Oh, these are so exciting. So this is one of my favorite fruits. This is a Szechuan pepper. And this isn't really a traditional fruit that you eat like a fruit. This is a spice that when you eat it, it makes your mouth go numb. Mmm, numbness. That's great. So if you've ever had a hot pot, Chinese Szechuan mala, as they call it, that flavor comes from this. And your whole mouth feels like it's vibrating. Ah, so good. Kind of painful a little bit, but in a good happy way. Szechuan peppers. So here we got some sumac. So sumac is used as a spice. It's got a nice kind of sour flavor that a lot of times in Turkish cuisine, they use as a seasoning on meat and on other items. Still pretty interesting. So here is another thing called a wahey. It has these seeds in here. You can eat them. And it tastes kind of like garlicky beans. And they're really productive. I mean, look at how many pods around me. The whole thing is just covered in beans. So this though is something very, very rare. This is the Myrica rubra or Yang Mei. This is one of the most commonly grown fruits in China. This is the only producing plant in Kern County. And there's only a few of these in the state of California. I've spent about $15,000 trying to grow these. And these are worth about $62 a pound. Now, if you want to try something really good, you're going to try this. This is really good. See your taste test first here. Yeah, it's really good. Tastes like a what? Like a cherry and a blueberry. They're very, very rare. I've never had that taste before. Not one. It's crazy. I'll save the seed. Even the seedlings of this are worth $150. At Murray Family Farms, it's taken us years of hard work to get here. And it's a lot of effort. But it's allowed me to have just this wonderful life where I get to do what I want to do. I love this stuff. It's very fulfilling when you can give people things from their childhood and share memories and just have delicious, high-quality fruit that are from these heirloom and old varieties that some of the stuff you can just only find here on this one farm. There's a bright future for us. We're going to continue to do farmer's markets. We're going to continue to sell to the public. And we're going to continue to have excellent, delicious varieties of fruit where you can actually taste it yourself.