Giant Catimon Mango at Maambal Orchard

There are two Giant Catimon mango trees at the Orchard, and both bore a lot of fruits this season. The fruit of this mango variety is very large, about three times the size of manggang kalabaw. We particularly like its sweetish taste when it's just about to ripen (manibalang). When fully ripe, it still tastes good, but if forced to choose only one, we'd still opt for the ripe manggang kalabaw.

This season, we saw for the first time the fruits of each individual mango tree in the Orchard, allowing us to ascertain which variety each tree belongs to.

Among the over two dozen mango trees in the Orchard, we counted six different varieties. The vast majority are manggang kalabaw, our preferred variety because of its unbelievable sweetness when ripe, and various stages of sourness when unripe. The rest are two types of piko (not good tasting when ripe), manggang supsupin, Giant Catimon and Indian mangoes.

An unpicked Giant Catimon mango fruit - with no familiarly sized object in the photo, the huge dimensions are not readily discernable.

The huge size of the fruit becomes apparent when we include a ruler in the photograph - the total length is over 7 inches!

This particular fruit tips the scales at 969 grams, and this is not yet the largest one we have harvested. Some of the even larger ones easily exceed 1 kg. 

This last photo shows the relative size of the Giant Catimon and a large specimen (for its variety) of manggang kalabaw from Zambales. It usually takes three pieces of manggang kalabaw to make 1 kg. We traditionally name something after kalabaw (carabao, or Philippine water buffalo) because of that thing's large size. But if manggang kalabaw is dwarfed by the Giant Catimon, which animal would fit the latter - manggang elepante? Or manggang balyena?