4 of the Best Tasting Fruits Ripening before Summer

All right everybody this is Ross and in today's video I want to share with you guys a few fruits that I'm growing here and kind of rate them in terms of flavor and talk about some of the reasons why I think you should grow them. The first one here actually is the honey berry and right now we're in the early part of June and I have probably about eight or nine different fruits ripe at the at the same time, one of which is actually the blueberry, one of which is the raspberry, we have cherries, a lot of these early or late spring early summer fruits, strawberries as well, we have them ripe but some of them you guys may never have heard of and actually are some of the best tasting fruits in my opinion and some of the fruits that you really ought to think about growing is actually the honey berry. It is so unique, so different and just insanely good. It took me a number of years to really learn when to pick these things but when you kind of get them a little bit shriveled and very soft on the bush they are an explosion of sweetness, tartness, a little bit of sour, a little bit of acidity, so much complexity in these fruits that it's insane. I promise you that if you enjoy food you're gonna like this fruit. I know it would make a great jam, I know it would make probably even a good wine. I like eating them fresh and I like eating them even when they're not that sweet. They're not a sweet fruit in general but when you get them super super soft like this and you can kind of visually see it when they're slightly drying up on the bush or drying up here on the on the ground maybe, the camera will focus for me, then this is the perfect time to pick them. You see how soft that is? It's not very firm at this point. It's almost like kind of like a balloon and you are squeezing the inside and you can tell that the inside of the balloon or you're squeezing the outside you can tell that the inside is a little bit hollow and that's kind of the feeling I get here because it's all just this amazing juice, super awesome grape, kiwi, red currant, blueberry flavor. Guys, I'm telling you it is so good. I eat handfuls and handfuls of these things and they leave an amazing flavor in your mouth that I think a lot of people don't really appreciate when they're eating their foods. It's really like a wine how it leaves that awesome almost like you know astringency or tannin like flavor or tannin like feeling in your mouth and it coats everything that you have going on and it's really just a way more intricate fruit than something like you know eating a raspberry or eating a strawberry and I think yeah those are great. They're very sweet. I love them but for my money it's so well balanced the honey berry and complex that it just for me brings those other fruits to a slightly higher level. Up next actually is the the mulberry and this is in my mind a complete 180 of what I just said and that this is a very sweet fruit and that this is not really the most complex fruit but it has an interesting berry flavor that I don't really find in many other things. I've grown almost all the fruits you can grow here. This is a variety called Girardi and Girardi is simply one of the better varieties for a home garden. It just stays super super small and compact but for me this thing produces a ton of fruit. They're very tasty and again the the mulberry flavor you just don't find that in many things. I have two grafted trees right next to each other. This is a younger tree here that we grafted last year and they're loaded with fruit. This one here I've grafted the year prior and these were grafted on the seedlings that just a bird pooped out and planted for me. So then I was like you know why not why graft why not graft onto them why rip them up out of the ground and these plants are so loaded with fruit. They're so productive that they typically don't grow very quickly and that's why they're so great for a home place a home garden. If I had a mulberry this age which this mulberry now this is its third season by the end of this season my Illinois Everbearing got to 20 feet tall. This this will get to six by six and you can keep it at six by six forever. So that's really amazing. I think personally it produces fruit just on the same level as the Illinois Everbearing. It performs just as well but I think it produces more fruit in a much smaller space. There's just nothing really quite like the mulberry and eating it fresh is is definitely the way to go for me. I know you can make syrups and different things out of it and shout out to my friend Romeo who his wonderful wife made some mulberry syrup one time for me and that stuff was out of this world. But uh the next fruit obviously you I think you guys know where I'm going. I think you guys know kind of what's going on here. It is of course the Gumi and this is a above and beyond. I would say the mulberry out of the three fruits that we mentioned is I would probably rank it number three but the mulberry or the Gumi here excuse me and the honey berry are relatively close. At this time of the year I find myself going after this more than anything else so I probably would put this Gumi bush at number one. It probably is just in general one of my favorite fruits and it's kind of really saying something because it it produces a lot of fruit. It's so easy to grow. I think in terms of just utter time that I spend on each individual plant and the time I spend around these things this one probably is the number one other than maybe the fig. So it just I could sit here like literally guys all day and just eat these berries. They're so good and it really is like I'm drinking some wine without the alcohol because every single bite or every berry that I eat coats your mouth just like the honey berry and gives you those awesome mouth feel feelings that last. It has a finish to it. The fruit like a wine and the honey berry they have a finish. How amazing is that? It is a much sweeter I think it is a sweeter fruit for sure than the honey berry. I like to hold them by the stems and I'll eat two at a time and then I'll kind of very carefully peel away the the pulp from the pits. They do have pits and the pits sometimes I even I kind of chew on them sometimes and it's just kind of fun to play with this fruit. I don't know what it is but the fruit is not only sweet it tastes like fruit punch so it has an interesting berry flavor. It is slightly astringent and the astringency I really like. Personally I think that's one of the more underrated underrated things that you can find in food. I know it's sometimes very overwhelming but if you pick them properly the astringency almost goes away completely or does go away completely or is much lessened depending on when you pick them. At least here with this carmine variety that I'm growing and then they're not only sweet have a berry flavor astringency but they're also acidic and slightly tart so it's like literally if you could wrap every single flavor and everything you could ever want into a food this is what it is. It doesn't have an umami flavor as far as I could tell there's no savoriness to it but it's sour sweet you know it's got everything. It's not salty all right we'll remove salty and umami but you kind of get my point here guys is that this thing is just purely utterly amazing so for me these are at least the three at this time of the year that I probably go for the most. I also really like the alpine strawberries let me show you those really quickly because the alpines can't be they can't be understated. Now the strawberries themselves I know I talk a lot about mar de bois the rucker scarlet's pretty darn good and even the purple wonder this year actually impressed me. I know I did a strawberry review but it came together here for me and I've been actually very impressed with it. What I have down here is actually some white alpine strawberries and these are just out of the out of this world good in terms of fruit quality and all the things I've kind of just been mentioning in this video it's it's really hard to beat. So I don't know where exactly I'd rank this thing I had to kind of think about it exactly but these are very very good fruits and in my mind what I should do and what I am doing actually is propagating more of these it's it's kind of rather simple to propagate them all I would do is pick a berry when it's ripe or even sort of slightly past its prime and then I will actually bury it smush it down on the soil. So I'll take one of these berries smush it down and smear it on the soil and then cover it slightly with some dirt or even you really don't want to cover them much at all because they need light to germinate. So that to me seems to work out really well sometimes even just not picking the berries they fall to the ground and then they germinate some new plants around it but this is a nice way I find at this time of the year it's probably perfect pick your berries smear them on the ground and walk away you'll get some new plants popping up in those places but anyway for me this is so so good amazingly fragrant really nice texture just melts in your mouth it's like I don't even know it really is just like chocolate just at that final stage when it just melts away and you still get the remnants of it these are really good even the white ones but the red ones I think are even slightly better so for me I'm gonna probably get myself some seeds of the red ones there's a variety called Rene des Valets I think is it called Rene des Valets I think that's right and I'm gonna plant myself some of those and start some in pots hopefully I get some good success but that was four fruits here guys that I seriously would highly highly highly recommend you guys try them and they ripen super early in the season they're all productive they all give you that wow factor and I just find myself gorging on fruit all day so thank you guys for watching this one we'll see you soon take care hit that subscribe button catch you guys for the next one