The Tropical Fruit Forum

Lisa.

Mike if you're up for some reading starting on page 50 in the "Key Issues" publication they talk about different rootstock used over in Australia. http://era.daf.qld.gov.au/id/eprint/1653/

Yes. They tend to be dwarfing on sugar apple rootstock and I've been told shorter lived at around 9 years or so.

If someone wanted to get atemoya scion from Australia Paxton prolific aka AJ Pinks, Hillary white, real Pinks Mammoth and maybe tropic sun would be on the hit list for acquisition.They wouldn't bother with relatively low quality widespread varieties like gefner or African pride.It doesn't really look like any of these but they are variable and climate and nutrition can influence phenotypic expression. Any info on the source at either end or location in Australia or US?

I don't have much info on either side of it unfortunately.

Side note: you said real Pink's Mammoth. Is there known to be an impostor Pink's Mammoth here in the states?

If I had to choose just one I'd go with atemoya. There are a ton of named varieties you could topwork on a single tree for wide variety of flavors and appearance. Atemoya is also more cold tolerant than soursop, though unless I regularly hit 32 or lower I wouldn't worry too much about planting a soursop. If you're looking to sell fruit you'll probably get better prices for soursop since it is generally better known. Personally I'd rather eat atemoya or cherimoya, and would pay higher prices for those, but most folks have no clue about atemoya.

I'll join the dogpile of folks saying they've gotten soursop much lower than 50 without it dying. I had a maybe 2ft tall soursop in a 3gal pot that survived mid 30s while being badly neglected. It dropped leaves, but bounced right back in the spring and is now over 6' tall planted out at a friend's house. I have plenty of other soursop that got high 30s in pots last year and while they dropped leaves and aren't as big as they would be had it remained in the 50s, they're still growing bigger each year.

Congrats on being one of the few folks growing and fruiting this species here in FL. I hope to join that club in the next year or two once my Genova Red is big enough.

When you have some fool trying to draw a parallel in cancer causing ability between meat and cigarettes and plutonium, it is a pretty safe bet that you're watching an animal rights activist's propaganda flick.

Didn't there used to be an off topic section for this sort of discussion? Is this sort of off topic discussion generally accepted as OK in this part of the forum now? Personally I'm not a fan but I'm usually good at ignoring it.

My recommendation,  for what its worth as I am just a straw biting townhouse know-nothing hillbilly, is to limit the topworking to two varieties.

Don't be modest now Rob, you deserve at least another 3 or 4 adjectives there. 

Yes, now is a good time to graft, when mangos are growing vigorously. Try to get budwood that has swollen buds but isn't already pushing. Bark grafting is pretty straight forward and easy enough to do 3 or 4 scions per limb so you have good odds of getting at least one to take.

Quote from: JF on July 22, 2017, 08:11:19 PM

Let's put an end to this nonsense

focus on the leaves

JF, lets.
What are the 4 leaves.
Is Dom's summary correct?
Kindly expand so all is clear.

I was messing with JF above, sorry if that confused things. In his picture the top is A. reticulata and the bottom is A. cherimola. The tree you saw locally is unequivocally A. reticulata, which many Cubans refer to as "chirimoya."

The tree in the pictures is looks like A. reticulata to me: elongated pointy somewhat shiny leaves, short flowers flowering in clusters are the two main factors that stand out to me. It definitely isn't a cherimoya.

Cherimoya flowers just fine in Florida and sets fruit OK too. The trick is getting it to hold fruit to maturity, which is fairly rare so far. My understanding is it will hold fruit until the seeds are viable and stop developing shortly after.

With a newer tree I like tip pruning and stripping the next few leaves off when a branch gets a little over a foot long. I usually cut it back to about a foot long and pop off the next 2-4 leaves to encourage new branching. More branching means more fruiting later.

Personally I wouldn't really worry about the flowers, just make sure you don't hold too much fruit on a young tree. There's a big difference though between a 4' single whip atemoya and a 4' atemoya with a ton of branching, but either way I wouldn't let it hold more than a fruit or two if you're determined to let it hold some. If you pulled that many flowers off of your tree I'd guess that is has some decent branching to it and is likely a healthy tree. A pic of your tree would help.