Quote:
Originally Posted by sputinc7
I don't want to argue with you, Gabe but.... this statement pretty much rules out Orinoco, doesn't it?
the fruit looks like normal bananas you would get from the store. (not short and fat or odd shaped) except they are smaller, he said they are very sweet and good!!
Orinoco is oddly shaped and not very sweet...
Just a thought.
Whatever it is, he has done well in his zone.
|
I thought about this bit of info too, but erred on the side of that being indirect information (our poster has never observed the fruit), and in my experience with bananas, unless someone has a broad range of experience eating many different banana varieties and is interested enough to really note their differences, its not unusual to “round up” to percieved similarities. Its hard to detail differences if you dont know what the range of different possibilities is.
Taste is also extremely subjective, and people very often describe fruits as sweeter if they are actually just more acidic. Its not harder for any homegrown banana to be sweeter than a standard export Cavendish, but even setting that aside, if you give an average person a ‘Namwah’ and a ‘Brazilian’ and ask which one is sweeter, they will almost always say the ‘Brazilian’. If you measure the brix, the ‘Namwah’ is sweeter and has more sugar, but it has almost no acidity, and the slight acidity in the ‘Brazilian’ compels most people to describe it as sweeter. I generally disregard taste assessments unless its from someone who has tried many different types, otherwise there is not enough examples in their head to compare to, and even then, its always with a grain of salt. In grad school, I worked in a fruit breeding lab, and we would have to do papaya taste tests, and even though I had had a handful of different papayas before, I had to try about 25-30 different hybrids before I could really calibrate my mind enough to note any meaningful differences, they all tasted like papaya until I had enough of a range of different fruits to know what the boundaries/possibilties were.
My friends and I run a produce distribution company here in Hawaii, and it is a constant process to work with our growers for them to be able to properly ID banana varieties and tell two different ones apart. What are painfully obvious differences to me, because im interested and have seen so many, often does not register with less banana-minded folks, and i routinely have to sit down with them and go through how to ID them.
And that is just the fruit. We are looking here at plants which also have a lot of information to be observed, the plant is clearly an ABB, and has classic Bluggoe (subgroup of ‘Orinoco’) traits. To me it is much more likely that someone saw and ate the fruit, figured its pretty much a banana, and rounded it up to being more or less similar to the probably the only other banana theyve had, rather than that this is some ultra unique and mysterious hardy banana with the vegatative traits of ‘Orinoco’ (which is a ubiquitous plant) and the fruit of a Cavendish. Everything is possible, but not everything is likely. Just my morning thoughts, I could be wrong, but I’d put my money on ‘Orinoco’.