The Internet's Finest Tropical Fruit Discussion Forum!"All discussion content within the forum reflects the views of the individual participants and does not necessarily represent the views held by the Tropical Fruit Forum as an organization."
Really cool to see thanks.What are the spacings they use?
I passed by the farm today and was shocked to find literally tons of fruit on the ground. Workers told me they had been instructed to remove all ripe colored fruit, anything with defects like dark edges or any with surface defects of any kind. They ship these and they must be pristine and unripe to survive the trip or else the box gets spoiled. Probably 90% of the crop was removed.Yes, it looks like and actually is a terrible waste but remember they have four other farms exactly like this and have no plan for dealing with the 'over-ripe' fruit. Really, though, the fruit is actually just ripe but nevertheless gets rejected for their purposes. This is also a reason why the fruit doesn't become popular, very few who buy these ever get to taste a ripe one. Most Carambola/Star fruit that makes it to market is really just a tasteless semi-ripe curious shaped fruit and nothing more.
such a beautiful orchard, that is at least before they butchered them in those last pics. Their starfruit is really growing.. sadly my starfruit tree always has fruit flies, Several fruit fly bottle traps right on the tree, somehow they still get in.Also I chop the leading branch, and then a year later, I got 1 new leader, no crown, not even threes. I'll keep at it, but the growth sure has been slow.
This is the same farm they have started annual pruning. I think they stagger the pruning dates to help stagger the harvest date.The prunings are dropped between the trees and shredded in place later using a Flail mower which can handle fairly large material and holds it inside to reduce it down in size.
Are you familiar with their use of herbicides to manage weed growth within the rows?