Congratulations!! That looks healthy. I miss seeing these little guys - last memory of smelling the flowers and seeing baby fruits is like many calendars ago as a kid.

Thanks. It looks good in that photo but the tree isn't long for this world. There was a weakness in the trunk from before I bought my place. Fungus got in plus boring insects. During a storm half the tree came down and each year during cyclone season I expect the rest to come down. It still keeps going though and tries to cover the damaged area but it's too big. Even if it did the core would still be hollow and the rot still going. Although fairly tall, if/when it does fall it won't damage anything. Meantime, it adds to my 'Perfumed Garden'.

aww too bad, hope you'll be able to enjoy a few fruits before having to replace it. Are you in the States or in Asia? The surrounding landscape of your garden looks very tropical.

I hope your tree will make it to grow all those fruit for you. Will you be able to start growing seedlings out of the fruit of this tree?

Recently, I started some seeds from "Sweet Jackfruit" which I bought from an Asian store here. I don't know if that Sweet Jackfruit is a variety itself. It has smaller and rounder seeds. I sprouted a bunch of them and many are sprouting. I have already sprouted a bunch of bigger seeded seedlings. They are all about a year old and about 1.5 ft tall. I just grow them for fun and wonder if these seedlings will grow into fruiting trees with similar taste quality as their parent plant.

Bananafan2, I think there is a recent Fairchild developed jack that they are calling Fairchild Sweet. I doubt there are enough people growing Fairchild Sweet long enough for those fruit to show up in stores. A little over a year ago I got seeds from another Fairchild developed jack they were calling Fairchild Hardy.

I also recently got a 23 pound jackfruit from a local ethnic market, no names on them, just imported from Mexico. It was the sweetest, lemony flavor, best tasting one that I have ever tasted. We had a meeting of out tropical fruit growing club the day after I cleaned it and I brought some in to give to some of the members who know jack about jack fruit to see if they might have a idea on what type it was. None had a guess on what type, but they agreed that it was really sweet and flavorful. One member (he was in top 2 of those I wanted to try it) said to plant the seeds and that they will be "pretty close" to the mother plant. I might plant some but I already have 9 growing (6 grafted, 3 seedlings), none big enough to fruit yet, but I have had flowers on 3 last year.

I am North of you so keeping mine will be a challenge, but they are sheltered from the North by my neighbor's house and sheltered above by his huge oak tree. I was told that there is somebody not far from me that has one that has been fruiting for a few years. So I have hope.

DM

TheNewLandscape, I'm in Australia. There's a much larger fruit high up in the tree but it keeps pushing out more fruits on this same low branch. I'm going to have to thin them out.

Are you sure they are all fruits? I count 6 fruits and if they all get 25 kg that will be 150 kg and break the tree i guess. I can't believe so many fruits will hang on that thin branch.

Can they not be flowers?? For me it looks a bit overkill but i don't know much about jacks, mine still never fruited.

Cool. Interesting to see them that young. Do you have any photos of them in flower? Never seen that.

DM,

You do have quite a collection of jackfruit there. Now, what would you do if they all fruit for you? When I bought that Sweet Jackfruit, they only sell them as a whole fruit, so I got no choice, just took the least chunky one. It's a lot of work to peal in order to get out the individual fruit. When we got them out, I was wondering what to do with them. I decided to blend it with yogurt for a smoothie. It turned out rather nice. Without water, the texture is more like a pudding. Even so, there was still a lot of fruit to consume. The taste I thought resembles mango, but with a rubbery texture to it.

Do you have some pictures of your Jackfruit trees to share? Are they in the ground, or still in the pots?

Thought I'd post some photos of Jackfruit flowers. Their flowers are probably some of the most 'un-flower-like' flowers of the plant world.

Female flowers, more like just a dense cluster of pistils. Not sure if that "cluster" counts as an inflorescence, or as one flower.

Male flower/s

wow- strange. Are Jackfruit considered "primitive plants" like Magnolia's or Cycads and the like?

Come to think of it ..no wonder they are in University collections as teaching plants.

Haven't heard of them being referred to as 'primitive plants'.

Continuing to make progress. These should be reasonably easy to protect from animals. There's more higher up in the tree, but I'll leave those for the animals.

im hoping i can get away with getting fruit one day.

i had several seedlings, so i planted 1 in the ground, figuring it didnt have a god chance of surviving the winter.

last winter it hit 28F for a few hours. Over the weeks it dried out and looked dead. The top even snapped off, almost to the ground... in late spring i saw leaves pop out. It is now 3ft tall. I hope we have a mild winter this year and it doesnt freeze to the ground again.

The other one i have left is in a container. i will probably plant it out in spring, or, maybe wait one more year till it gets larger.

What time of year do they flower and fruit ?

I am hoping the winter doesnt interrupt the fruiting cycle.

last month pic / container

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This spring

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last month

Greenman, your tree is starting to look good, best of luck with it. Here my Jackfruit start to flower in mid winter. You can't miss when it's happening, the fragrance of the flowers is quite strong. They're about the same time as Mangos. The fruits in the last photo are about 3.5 months old.

The Sulphur-crested Cockatoos have started chewing into some of the fruit at the top of the tree so I decided it was time to put up some protection. The wire mesh was easy to put around the fruit bunch at the bottom of the tree. The fruit higher up will be food for the wildlife. What's being protected is more than enough for me.

Personally, I think jackfruit is disgusting tastewise, but in appearance it is like a very rare and exotic fruit, something that would really amaze the neighbors or visitors.

directed to stanofh - Jackfruit is related to Breadfruit and Durian.

There's a lot of different varieties of Jackfruit with differing flavours/tastes. It'd be a matter of just finding one that suits. I know there's one variety grown here that is exported to Singapore where it's very popular. Unfortunately, it isn't the one I have. I don't mind the flavour of mine although not the best I've tasted. Some they sell at the markets are quite good. Although you never see them in supermarkets here they're not considered particularly exotic as they are fairly common.

Currently there's 64 accepted species of Artocarpus, but only a few of them are common in horticulture. An interesting thing I found out is that the fruiting process of the genus is considered to be advanced in evolutionary terms, rather than being "primitive".