After referring on several occasions to Tropical Fruit Forum’s vast communal archive of fruit growing information, I figured it was time to stop lurking as a guest, register on the site, and introduce myself.
I am new to “serious” fruit growing, though I have almost always had tomatoes, strawberries, blueberries, and the like; a small garden plot and a few fruiting plants in the yard are a longstanding, but fading, tradition in my part of the world. My fruit growing started innocently in July 2017 when my mother came over with an orange she received at work. It was a good tasting orange, probably a Valencia, rather small, with two seeds, a large seed and a tiny runt of a seed. It had been several years since I had eaten an orange with seeds (or just about any orange, as I had lost whatever love I had for the quite bland grocery store navel orange), so on a whim, I planted them. Little did I know what I was getting myself into…
Fast forward two years and it is time to admit that I am addicted to growing fruit plants, particularly tropical and subtropical ones which cannot survive my climate. As I live in north Alabama, which gets the worst of all weather with blisteringly hot summers and freezing winters, my non-temperate fruit plant collection is confined to containers scattered outside my house in the summer and inside during winter. And boy, is the number of containers ever growing. With the exception of a Calamondin bought half price at Lowe’s, a Grimal Jaboticaba purchased on eBay, and an unknown variety of Dragon Fruit given to me by a friend who shares my fruit addiction, all of my other three dozen species or varieties of tropical or subtropical fruiting plants have been grown from seed, bought either from various sellers on eBay or Trade Winds Fruit or harvested from the fruit itself. I have thirteen varieties of Citrus, Annonas of various types, a couple of Eugenia species, Lychees, Jackfruits (I know, good luck getting one of those to fruit in a container), Carambolas, Passion Fruits, and more. And then there are the centerpieces of my collection: one two-year-old, approximately 18” tall orange tree, probably a Valencia, and its approximately 8” tall runt of a sibling. Who says a little sentimentality is a bad thing.
I also have some temperate fruiting plants in my yard, ranging from the expected such as strawberries and blackberries, to the uncommon such as pawpaws and maypops (Passiflora incarnata), to the rarely eaten such as beautyberry (Callicarpa americana).