Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.

Topics - PersephonesChild

Pages: [1]

Tropical Fruit Discussion / Mamey Sapote Seed Experiment

« on: June 15, 2020, 12:33:15 AM »

I picked up 2 mamey sapote fruits this week from my local specialty grocer, and oh, boy! So. Delicious. But, I'm a plant nerd, and I can't bring myself to toss the seeds when I could grow them instead.

Anyway, I wound up with 5 seeds:
1 slightly split naturally inside fruit
4 totally sealed shut

After checking online, it appeared the seed coat needed to be split for proper germination. Recommend method was squashing the seed between a couple 2x4s. After doing that to two of them, and causing both to fracture badly enough for a piece of the shell to come off, I concluded that maybe I should try a different method of scarafication. So I sanded the edges off of the other 2 until the shell was thin enough that the pressure inside the seed caused a natural crack to form.

So now I had:
1 naturally cracked seed
2 manually cracked seeds
2 sanded seeds with natural cracks

Soaked all 5 for about an hour in a bowl of water. This caused the cracks to get bigger on all 5 seeds.

Planted the 2 manually cracked seeds in 1/2 gallon poly bags with a loose & draining but moisture-retentive soil.

Put the other 3 in wet paper towels in bags like was shown in several of the germination guides I saw online. This is how I sprout my mango seeds, so it seemed legit.

All 5 seeds did get a quick spray of an organic plant fungicide to deter mold.

Now we see what grows faster!

Tropical Fruit Discussion / Buying Ice Cream Bean Seeds?

« on: June 15, 2020, 12:16:54 AM »

Hadn't ever heard of them until recently, but after seeing it come up so many times in this forum, I looked into Ice Cream Bean trees, and really would like to add it to my collection. I mean, tastes like ice cream, melts like cotton candy...yum. Sadly, none of the specialty grocers in my area seem to sell it, leaving me to resort to purchase online.

Does anyone know if the seeds remain viable long enough for it to be shipped from an online seller, or is it like so many other tropical plants where they loose viability rapidly so seeds must be planted in short order after removal from fruit?

Much as I want to try these, I can't really justify plopping down $40 for a single seedling of something I haven't even tried before. Seeds are sometimes a much better deal for the patient grower, but not if they can't possibly be sprouted.

Temperate Fruit Discussion / Should I Let Goji Cuttings Flower?

« on: June 14, 2020, 03:06:33 PM »

I've grown goji in the past, but had to leave them behind in a move several years ago, and recently decided to obtain new plants. Turns out I could get 20+ cuttings for less than a single rooted one, so I decided to give it a go. Ordered a bundle of 25 cuttings, shipped with no leaves. Have never done goji cuttings before, but I've rooted other things, so I figured I could manage, and the price was low enough to be willing to risk failure.

It's been 3 weeks since I started my batch of goji cuttings. They're in clear cups filled with a mix of mulch, peat and vermiculite in a humidity box, and now about half are budding and flowering. All have rooted, a few even growing roots out the drain holes in the cups. The ones with flowers have also pushed a good 5 inches of new stems as well.

Should I let them flower, or should I pinch the buds off to try and force more root growth at this point? Will it matter?

If they were slower rooting or just barely growing, I wouldn't even think to let them fruit so soon, but they are growing probably 4x as fast as the grapes I started a week before, and 2x or 3x as fast as the figs. I'm honestly impressed with how rapid the rooting and growth has been by comparison to other shrubs and trees I've worked with.

Also, at the rate these are going, why are commercial nurseries not churning out mounds of cheaply priced goji plants for all the big box stores? I feel there could be a lot of cash made very quickly by growers here. I mean, I coughed up $25 each for my 1g goji plants before...just saying...

Tropical Fruit Discussion / Question about In-Vitro Plants

« on: June 10, 2020, 03:55:13 PM »

So, I've bought many of my exotics online from places like Well Spring Gardens and other e-nurseries over the years, partly because I don't live near a local source for them and partly because I can get a lot more plants at $6-$19 each than I can at $35-$100 each, and I just sort of go in knowing I'm going to have to wait longer for them to attain size. Anyway, I long assumed that most of the named cultivars I was getting were taken using standard vegetative methods, but one would expect that such small plants grown that way would look like rooted cuttings, not like seedlings. This bugged me for a while, but some point I realized they are probably in-vitro clones. (Honestly I should have figured that out sooner; I've been buying in-vitro aquarium plants for ages.)

Do in-vitro clones mature for fruiting purposes at the same rate as seedlings, or the rate of cuttings? That difference could affect the fruiting timeline on some of my plants by 3-5 years in some cases. I mean, I'm going to keep growing them either way, and I'll probably keep buying a lot of tissue cultures due to their price and availability, but I would like to narrow down the window a bit more on when to expect fruiting to finally occur.

Tropical Fruit Discussion / Transferring Cherimoya Seedlings?

« on: June 06, 2020, 11:03:07 PM »

Hi all. I'm new to the forum, and after browsing a bit, it looks like a lot of folks here are pretty knowledgeable about cherimoya, so hopefully someone can weigh in on an issue that I probably should have considered at the time I did it...

I've planted about 80 cherimoya seeds (and a dozen sweetsop), and some are beginning to sprout now. However, due to indoor space constraints because my shadehouse is currently half torn apart and my mist system disconnected so I can build proper benches (it's a plant-splosion in my house right now...potted plants and humidity boxes full of cuttings are everywhere), I started them in large trays (actually, a couple plastic sweater boxes full of seedling potting mix) all together spaced about 3cm apart. How large should I let them get before separating them into individual pots for grow-out?

Past experience with other perennials has taught me that some plants respond better when moved as soon as the first leaves emerge, others need a couple sets, and some don't care when you do it. I've never grown cherimoya before, let alone from seed. (Yes, you can totally facepalm at my lack of forethought here. I would too.) I would hate to accidentally kill all my baby trees through poor choice of timing in the transfer, and while I certainly have enough to afford to loose a few, I'd like to keep the damage to a minimum.