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Messages - KarenRei

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1501
Tropical Fruit Discussion / Re: Mexicola Avocado
« on: June 12, 2012, 08:02:05 AM »
The tree north of you could be in a microclimate.  Just pointing that out.  :)

1502
Quote
I have the same issue with most plants I move in and out of my house every year; they lose all of their "indoor" leaves and produce new outside-adapted leaves.

Are you not hardening your plants?  It's not a requirement that that has to happen...

1503
Tropical Fruit Discussion / Re: Passionfruit - okay to let rootbind?
« on: June 12, 2012, 06:15:00 AM »

@fruitlovers: I already moved it into a 15 gallon, heh; I'll just deal with having a very large passionfruit vine and probably end up giving a bunch of fruit away.  Or hmm, wonder if I could sell it here.  Icelandic-grown passionfruit on a commercial market, I bet that'd be a first.  Does passionfruit fruit in flushes or continuously?  No worries about it growing into the ground; the ground is a solid floor and there's an undirskál (what do you call that thing you put under a pot?) between it.  :)

Here they flower and fruit continuously for several months.

Very cool; bet it'll fruit continuously for me, then, since the conditions are pretty much constant inside.  Better double-check my fertilizer supplies, lol!

(Ah, I was going to ask what you're still doing awake, but then I noticed that you're in hawaii... forgot about all you pacific islanders here  :) )

1504
Tropical Fruit Discussion / Re: chilli overload
« on: June 12, 2012, 06:04:02 AM »
To be fair, I don't think there's a person on the planet who could manage to consume 40 grams of resiniferatoxin   ;)  And yeah, I think any plants containing TrpV1 agents as powerful as resiniferatoxin are properly named "toxic"  ;)  Again, like capsaicin, it won't injure you directly, but you tick off your body so much that it attacks itself!

1505
Tropical Fruit Discussion / Re: Solanum robustum
« on: June 12, 2012, 05:59:58 AM »
Remember Burbank's wonderberry? There are still some that think that fruit is toxic. FYI also tomatoes were not eaten by europeans for a full 200 years because they were thought to be poisonous. Rather ironic because now that is the number one selling veggie, and number one favorite plant of beginning gardeners.

And the Germans thought that tomatoes were tied to lycanthrope.  So we get the genus and species name, "Solanum lycopersicum" - the "Nightshade Wolf-Peach".  Not the most appealing name for a fruit!  ;)

To be fair, Europeans had known about deadly nightshade since time immemorial, but had never known an edible solanum, while edible solanums were abundant in the New World.  So naturally it was difficult to get people to accept that they're eating a nightshade for dinner!  The Italians and Spanish were among the first European countries to begin to accept tomatoes into their culinary tradition; the British, Germans, and most other Europeans took a lot longer.  In the new world, a number of the American founding fathers cultivated and helped popularize tomatoes to a skeptical public, as well as experiment with selective breeding to create more appealing fruit.

Spain's early adoption of the tomato I'm sure was in no small part due to their extensive colonies in the new world.  However I can't help but wonder if the reason it was easier for Italy to accept the consumption of tomatoes was because Italy had a long tradition of consumption of even the poisonous solanums.  "Belladonna" ("beautiful woman") gets its name because of the old Italian usage of the plant as a medicinal cosmetic.  Women would take it to dilate their pupils and flush their skin, which was considered attractive.  So if you already have an association with solanums being "sexy"...

1506
Cacao is such a lovely tree.  The new leaves that come in are so paper-thin they're translucent, just so delicate, but then grow super rapidly to large size before firming up.  It's kind of like watching a banana plant grow, where you can easily see the difference in growth from day to day.  I just potted mine up from a 3 gallon to a 7 gallon; hope it likes the extra space.

1507
Tropical Fruit Discussion / Re: Passionfruit - okay to let rootbind?
« on: June 12, 2012, 05:47:12 AM »
@Tomas: Interesting - so cuttings retain their maturity, then?  Nice to know; whenever I have to prune it back I can make a bunch of babies that don't take long to fruit.  :)  Heh, planting outside isn't an option for me.  That would otherwise be known as "purposely killing my passionfruit"  ;)  A cold snap can drop temperatures below freezing in even september here.  And you know how some tropicals can stop growing if temps go below 10C or even start to die back (for example, I know that coffee does that)?  Half our nights even in July get that cold!  And our average July day gets up to only 15-16C! (~60F, for those of you in the US).  Our winters aren't super-cold by American standards, but we basically have no summer.

@Fyliu: Indeed, I posted the top picture for comparison.  I've been getting shoots like the top one for a long time; they grow into vines.  But the bottom type I don't think I've seen before.  I did some google image searching of passionfruit buds, and I think it is a flower.  Yeay!  :)

@stressbaby: The concept of root pruning has always scared me, but then again, I've heard it can be good for a plant.  So I'll probably give it a try in a few months when it inevitably fills up the 15 gallon. 

@fruitlovers: I already moved it into a 15 gallon, heh; I'll just deal with having a very large passionfruit vine and probably end up giving a bunch of fruit away.  Or hmm, wonder if I could sell it here.  Icelandic-grown passionfruit on a commercial market, I bet that'd be a first.  Does passionfruit fruit in flushes or continuously?  No worries about it growing into the ground; the ground is a solid floor and there's an undirskál (in English, what do you call that thing you put under a pot?) between it.  :) 

1508
Tropical Fruit Discussion / Re: chilli overload
« on: June 11, 2012, 10:30:05 PM »
Resin spurge, for example.  And if you try it, plan on them being ex-friends and estranged family members.  ;)  Just like capsaicin, it doesn't do any real damage by itself - it just activates the receptor TrpV1.  But it's so potent that the inflammatory response from your body can do damage, like what would happen if you downed a kilogram of bhut jholokia peppers or half a cup of pure capsaicin, only you only need a tenth of a gram  of resiniferatoxin to do the same thing.  Pure capsaicin is 16 million on the scoville scale.  Resiniferatoxin is 16 *billion*.  To put it another way, what anaheim or poblano pepper is to a bhut jholokia on the scoville scale, capsaicin is to resiniferatoxin.

Happy dining  ;)

1509
Tropical Fruit Discussion / Re: Passionfruit - okay to let rootbind?
« on: June 11, 2012, 10:07:12 PM »
Oh, hey, speak of the devil - is this a new type of side shoot I'm seeing -- perhaps a developing flower bud???  Or am I just being too optimistic?

Old shoot type, grows into a branch if the plant feels like it wants one there:


New type - blossom?:


1510
The Agat mango festival was/is mostly coordinated by the town mayor. Population: 6,000. LOL!

Hey, never underestimate what a small town can pull off  :)  One of my favorite music festivals here in Iceland is held in a town of only 130 people, lol! 

Overall we've got about twice as many people as you but 200 times the land area; even our medium-sized glaciers are bigger than Guam, lol!  But you totally beat us hands down on the mangos  ;)  Delish!

1511
Tropical Fruit Discussion / Passionfruit - okay to let rootbind?
« on: June 11, 2012, 09:31:36 AM »
So as you know, I do my growing of tropicals indoors under lights.  This weekend I had a nice transplant-fest, wherein I buy a couple large pots from the IKEA in Garđarbć and then shift everything up a notch - plant A goes into a 15 gallon, freeing up a 7; plant B goes into the 7, freeing up a 3 gallon, and on and on down the line to transplanting-up seedlings.  One of my large transplant-ees this time was my passionfruit, which went into a 15 gallon.  As I suspected, it had been starting to get rootbound, so I felt I just had to move it up a pot size.

However, 15 gallons for a passionfruit, I can't imagine going any bigger than that.  I've seen pictures of people fruiting them in 5 gallons.  Given it's history, I'm afraid it's just going to bind up again.  Do you think it's okay just to let that happen?  It's never flowered, and I'd hate to have to have to go even bigger just to get it to flower - I need room for all my other plants, quite a number of which are ultimately going to need 25 gallons or more!  :)  I plan to try to induce flowering a few weeks from now with a low-N, high K/P fert. mix I made, once it's burned through most of it's current mix, but if that doesn't work...

Also, as a side question, while English is my native language, I'm starting to find myself having deficiencies remembering English words sometimes if I don't use them often. What do you call the thing that you put underneath a plant pot to protect the floor?  It's undirskál in Icelandic but I just can't remember the English word for it.

1512
Tropical Fruit Discussion / Re: chilli overload
« on: June 11, 2012, 08:25:03 AM »
You know, everyone focusing on capsaicin content of chilis is focusing on the small time.   ;)  Try some resin spurge or something else with resiniferatoxin.  It activates the same pain receptors as capsaicin, but is orders of magnitude more potent.

1513
Tropical Fruit Discussion / Re: Solanum robustum
« on: June 10, 2012, 08:31:54 PM »
Quote
Some of them best tasting Solanums are truly tropical

Even garden tomatoes are really tropicals - just fast-growing annual ones  :).  Heat lovers that die back at the first sign of cold.

Has anyone here tried cocona?  I've wanted to grow it ever since I saw it on an episode of Survivorman, and finally picked up some seeds (which I'm hoping will sprout within the next few months, if I'm super-lucky)... but I've never tried it before.  It's another of those semi-obscure solanums, all of which seem to have a flavor that people describe as "A cross between X and a tomato"  ;).
een

1514
Tropical Fruit Discussion / Re: Solanum robustum
« on: June 10, 2012, 06:37:56 PM »
ASaffron: Could you provide a link to what you're talking about it being proven bogus?  I've seen more than one study, and Guadalupe is only part of the evidence.  For example, annonacin added to cultured nerve cells induces them to kill themselves, and lab rats fed annonacin developed characteristic brain lesions.  It's got all of the parts you want to see in a health risk assessment -- a theoretical method for a chemical's effects, direct evidence of the chemical having said health effects at the cellular level, and evidence that the effects are statistically evidence in the broader population. Looks pretty solid... with caveats.  They were only studying soursop, were cultivar-nonspecific, and didn't well separate sources of ingestion (leaf tea versus fruit consumption, for example, or juices versus whole fruit)

I say this as someone who still eats annonas despite having parkinsons risk in my family.  I just consume them within limits.  It's always the dose that makes the poison.  :)

1515
Tropical Fruit Discussion / Re: Solanum robustum
« on: June 10, 2012, 04:08:42 PM »
Well, if it was poisonous, and its poisons were characteristic of the genus, they'd be anticholinergic chemicals - that is, they act like nerve agents, blocking a single receptor in the nervous system.  The upside of such agents is that if you survive, there's generally no lasting effects; they're not bioaccumulative or cause organ failure or anything like that.  Given that you didn't even get *symptoms*, I'd think the plant would be pretty safe.  Heck, I'd be more worried about eating annonas because of the possible Parkinsons' risk, since that's a long-term thing.  Of course, I eat them anyway, just not too much   ;)

1516
Tropical Fruit Discussion / Re: Rollinia deliciosa picked today
« on: June 10, 2012, 03:56:10 PM »
Wow, Rollinia can fruit when that small and in that sized pot?

*Jumps with joy!*

I was kind of worried because I hadn't seen much data on how big they need to be - figured I'd just let them grow within the limits of a 3-meter ceiling and hope for the best  ;)

1517
Tropical Fruit Discussion / Re: Soil moisture compatibility
« on: June 08, 2012, 07:33:06 PM »
If I had a green house I would try to grow Passiflora lingularis, and that large tropical one related to quadrangularis. P. alata is popular in Brazil and the locals there would chase the bees away so they don't steal the pollen. Manual cross pollonation with a different genotype is necessary for fruit set. Both are better than the regular edulis people grow in SoCal.

Lingularis is called Grenada china(Chinese pomegranate) in Mexico.

Any clue whether they can cross pollinate with edulis?  Always looking for ideas to add to my wishlist  ;)

I think that when the passionfruit starts to burn through its current time-release fertilizer, I'll switch it to a low-N  and see if that helps encourage it to bloom.

1518
Tropical Fruit Discussion / Re: Obsessed with Fruit
« on: June 08, 2012, 06:36:26 PM »
I think we're all obsessed in our own ways.  I have a smaller collection here than most and most of mine are too small to fruit yet.  But that's only because I had to import them to Iceland in suitcases   ;)

1519
Tropical Fruit Discussion / Re: Soil moisture compatibility
« on: June 08, 2012, 06:31:27 PM »
Re, the cherimoya: Is chill needed just for fruit, or for general growth as well?  Because mine's not ready to try to push fruit on yet.    The only one of my plants I'd feel comfortable trying for force fruits on is the passionfruit, but I don't know how to do that and I'm not in a super rush at this point.  Well, my largest coffee would probably be fine with fruiting too, but I'd rather he grow another dozen centimeters or two.  Same with my orange.

1520
Hi Oscar,
The flower buds look nice. BTW what do you do with the fruits? I reckon you can make a nice milk shake out of the fruit.

I imagine only if you like avocado-flavored milkshakes, since that's what they're reputed to taste like.   ;)   Though having seen pictures of what they look like ripe, I'm awfully tempted to get one just for the beauty aspect alone!



I wonder how small you could keep one and still have it fruit?  Looks awfully big in your pic  :(

1521
Tropical Fruit Discussion / Re: Soil moisture compatibility
« on: June 08, 2012, 08:59:47 AM »
Stressbaby: The one and the same!  I live in Iceland now though; Iowa wasn't far enough north**  ;)  And I live in a duplex that has a common two-story geothermally-heated greenhouse (although I do most of my growing in my section of the house itself).

Thanks for the tips, both of you.  And yeah, I've found that my coffee prefers it wet, but it doesn't die readily if it gets dry like some plants.  If the soil gets bone dry then they do the whole tomato-plant thing of putting on a big show, "I'm A Poor Thirsty Plant, I'm DYYYYYING!!!!", then you give them water and 6 hours later it's like nothing ever happened.  ;)  But I guess that makes sense for the sort of climate they're native to where there are both wet and dry seasons.  By contrast, when my jabo got dry when a plantsitter neglected it, I had to basically put it on life support for a month; it's a miracle it and its three tiny half-dead leaves survived.


** Let's see... SoCal to Texas, Texas to Indiana, Indiana to Iowa, Iowa to Iceland... at this rate I think in 10 years I'll growing tropicals in Svalbard and will probably die as the greenhouse caretaker for the first human colony on Europa, lol  ;)

1522
Tropical Fruit Discussion / Soil moisture compatibility
« on: June 08, 2012, 06:44:06 AM »
So for a long time I've just been guessing at this on a lot of plants, and thought it'd be a good idea to elicit some feedback.  What is your experience with the soil moisture needs/tolerances of various plants?  Would they prefer it to stay mostly or very wet, or would they prefer it dry out between waterings?  Here's what I'm growing (from memory; I'll probably miss a couple) and what I (think) I know so far.

Acerola: ?
Bacupari: ?
Banana: Wet.  My mother managed to drown a pup once but it required a weak pup in a pot without holes to do so  ;)  Mine have always loved me for keeping their soil moist at all times and complained when I don't.
Bay laurel: ?
Cacao: Wet, I think.
Cashew: Either?
Cherimoya: ?
Coffee: Either wet or dry; they seem to be pretty hardy plants.
Dragonfruit: I would think dry, but it seems to tolerate or even enjoy wet just fine.
Guava: Loses leaves if it gets too dry, so I'd have to say wet.
Jaboticaba: Wet
Macadamia: ?
Mango: Dry.  Lost one to root rot years ago, don't want to do that again.
Meyer Lemon: I would think dry, but seems to enjoy the water, so I don't know
Moringa: Dry
Olive: Dry
Orange: I would think dry, but seems to enjoy the water, so I don't know
Passionfruit: Either wet or dry, within reason.
Pineapple: I would have thought dry, but they seem to grow at a crawl if dry but take off if wet.
Pomegranate: ?
Rollinia: Seems to prefer wet.
Vanilla: Dry (lots of forums of people posting about losing vanilla to root rot; I don't want to repeat that)

Stuff that hasn't sprouted yet:

Acai: ?
Chinese jujube: ?
Cocona: ?
Feijoa: ?
Kiwano: Tried growing these once before a while back and they all died young, never quite sure why (I suspected that it might have been spider mites, as the leaves looked suspect, but I never saw the buggers, so it could have been a moisture issue or something else).  So I don't really know.
Lemon mangosteen: ?
Sugar apple: ?
Tamarind: ?
Yerba mate: ?

I'm not listing common garden plants -- wrong forum, and generally really easy to grow.  I'm also growing Thuja plicatia, but that's not a tropical and its moisture requirements are best described as "tricky", at least in the seedling stage.  I think I've got a handle on it now, though... time will tell.  I'm hoping that some day, long after I'm dead, they'll become the tallest trees in Iceland  ;)  They're the only "giant" tree (as much as 2/3rds the height and girth of a sequoia, in good conditions) that's cold tolerant.

1523
Tropical Fruit Discussion / Re: Fruits of Peru
« on: June 07, 2012, 11:05:52 AM »
Hehe, like I said before, just have something innocent that you can pass it off as.  Back when I wasn't sure I'd be able to get my permits at all, I was coming up with all kinds of crazy ways to get the plants in, like turning them into wreaths or parrot toys or furniture etc while still alive... even did tests to see how extreme of conditions they could survive   ;)  Heck, I probably could have passed my passionfruit off as a wreath even when it was coming in as legit, as I had to reel it in a whole bunch and bind it up, and the root bundle wasn't visible through all the leaf mass.

1524
Tropical Fruit Discussion / Re: Dragonfruit: how best to support?
« on: June 07, 2012, 07:24:29 AM »
As a followup to the above, I was just curious and decided to calculate the efficiency of dragonfruit.  The highest rate I found for dragonfruit production is 25 metric tonnes per hectare per year.  That's 2500 grams per square meter, or about 2500 food calories per square meter per year.  A google image search of dragonfruit plantations looks like about 1/3rd of the light tends to hit the plants, the rest being open space, so let's assume that such high yield plantations are half-filled, giving an actual per square meter result of 5000 calories per year.  This yields a net dragonfruit production efficiency of only 0.35% - rather inefficient, clearly.  So that's ~45W of constant fluorescent / ~20W LED per 250g (small) dragonfruit per year.  Wow, that sucks  ;)  Of course, I doubt light was the limiting factor for that commercial production (probably something like water, nutrients, etc), but still... really stresses the importance of using the sun as much as possible!

1525
Tropical Fruit Discussion / Re: Dragonfruit: how best to support?
« on: June 07, 2012, 05:32:13 AM »
Oooh, awesome to know that you can fruit them in such small pots and such a small size  :)  A couple fruits every now and then is all I need from dragonfruit.  I like the fruit because they're so beautiful; the taste is kind of bland, IMHO.  As for varieties, living in Iceland, I'm kind of stuck with the variety I have at least for now, heh  ;)  It's not that you can't get unusual plants here which are not adapted for the climate (I picked up my olive tree here for example).  It's just that the safe default assumption here for tropical non-houseplants is always "not available until proven otherwise".  I forget which variety I'm growing, it's been so long since I ordered it, but I did compare a couple varieties before selecting this one.

As for the light, well, you have to compare it to the sun.  Most of the amazon basin gets 3-5 kWh/m˛/day.  So let's say 4.  That's an average of 167W.  The peak solar intensity on a perpendicular plate on the surface is 1000W, but there's night, there's clouds, there's angles, etc. 

Now we look at an artificial lighting setup.  First efficiency comes into the picture - not luminous efficiency, but quantum efficiency (luminous efficiency takes into account how the human eye sees light, which is irrelevant for plants; the human eye sees green best while green is worst for photosynthesis).  You'll get up to 30% on a good tube.  LEDs can approach 40% external quantum efficiency.  Because of bulb age and not having optimal bulbs to begin with, let's say 25% and 33% respectively.  Then there's light loss.  On Earth, the sun is always striking *something*, and if you have a plot of plants, the light that escapes hitting your plants is offset by light that escapes hitting other plants and hits yours instead.  You set up grow lights indoors, part of the light will escape and hit... well, something you don't care about.  Let's say 60% is useful.  So right there are some pretty massive losses.  Now there's the spectrum to take into account.  Actually, this is an advantage for indoor growers, because a third of the sun's energy is in infrared, which is worthless, and the rest pretty evenly spread, while photosynthesis absorption bands aren't.  Fluroescents are sort of a mixed bag in terms of what visible spectrum they provide, but at least there's not much IR** -- let's say credit them with 120% of the sun in terms of spectrum efficiency.  LEDs, with blue and red, esp red, are spot on for photosynthesis; credit them with 200% spectral efficiency.  Note that we're not considering hormonal effects of a different spectrum than the sun; for example, while my dragonfruit loves all that LED energy, I know from experience that if I were to try to grow, say, lettuce under it, the lettuce would be horribly lanky and basically a disaster.  But here we're just talking about energy.

So, to match the Amazonian sun with fluorescents, you need 927W/m˛.  With LEDs, it's 421W/m˛.  Note that that's per square meter.  Growing even a couple square meters indoors like I do, and well... matching the sun takes a lot of light!  During the winter I'll have to replace pretty much the entire sun; there's several hours of "dim" outside but the sun won't rise over the houses to my south until late February or so.  During the summer at least I have those nice picture windows to help out.  :)

I really think that the number one limitation of most people growing plants indoors is not grasping how much energy plants really get from the sun and how little most indoor lighting provides.  Our eyes see light logarithmically, not linearly.  It may not look that much brighter outside, but it really is.  If we saw light linearly, outdoors would be blinding and indoors would be like a cave.  And it makes sense that it takes so much energy to produce food when you look at internal plant losses; food crops which are fully healthy and getting enough light (and everything else) range from a tiny fraction of a percent to 1% of their energy going into the final edible portion (fruits and vegetables), to a couple percent (grains), to as much as 10% in extreme cases like sugarcane.  So a 1% efficient plant in the Amazonian sun is actually only getting around "productive" 1 1/2 kilowatt hours of energy per square meter month!  That's 1200 food calories per square meter per month.  And if you "underfeed" the plant in terms of light, it's going to be needing all of the energy it gets just to try to stay alive.


** To be fair, there actually *is* a lot of IR, but it's far IR, heat radiating from the glass and ballast due to the efficiency losses - and since that's already counted under the efficiency losses, there's no need to count it twice.

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