Hi! Good to see this in North Texas. Glad to see you're trying in the ground, your trees look great.
I'm in North Dallas, and have 2 Longan trees in pots. They are doing nicely, with the larger 1 flowering right now. Smaller one I had some fruits last year, but not more than 30 or so as I didn't want to overstress the tree.
I did have a Mauritius lychee, but I had it inside an apartment for the winter and it ended up not getting enough water (and dying). I'm thinking of trying again, but a bit of an expensive mistake! Next time I may try a cheaper non-hardened air-layer instead of a mature tree in a pot. Better chances now that I have a greenhouse for the winter, but I need to get rain water collection going, as I think eventually tap water salts would overwhelm the lychee.
Longan seems much easier to grow and fruit in containers for me. Glad to see lychee working out for you.
Here's a couple pics of flowers and the 2 trees:
I also grafted my first plant today. Took a nice cutting from my NDM (supposedly) Mango and onto a 2 year old seedling. I only had one other seedling (looked poly-embryonic), so I decided to graft the other seedling. Few others that I grew ended up dying off, but that was probably more due to neglect as I wasn't planning to graft them at the time. Maybe in the future we could trade some scions or air-layers. I also have a Geffner Atemoya that's a bit scraggly, but making it. Hoping to get some good tropical fruit this year. Really excited to see someone else in Dallas area trying the same thing.