Container Sweetheart Lychee

[simon_grow]

still trying to sell my 25 gal sweetheart for $200....any takers?

So far i've been disappointed with this tree...lots of flowers, but fruits all seem to fall off or split.

I've seen brewster and mauritius fruiting well in small pots...

I know treehouse nursery had some nice 200 gal trees...they would fruit just like any tree in the ground....there's a pic of one such tree in Bill Whitman's book, 5 decades.

Adam, I wish you lived in San Diego, I'd take that tree in a heartbeat. Perhaps you can try girdling a branch or two this winter in order to increase fruit set. I have a theory that the Sweetheart variety has high fruit drop rate due to the high number of atrophied seeds in its fruit. Not sure if the chicken tongue seeds are caused by malformed pollen or what but I would hazard to guess that girdling branches will help with fruit retention.
Simon

[Zambezi]

Htown representing, I love it!!! Doglips, Houston water is horrible for all kinds of plants, especially acid loving plants which Lychee and Blueberries are. I use nothing but rain water collected from my gutters and Microlife Fert. I fert about every 2 months starting late Feb/early March.  Also starting with the right PH potting mix helps as well. For both Blueberries and Lychee I use a mix of about 60%-70% pine bark mulch and the rest Spag Peatmoss. If I have perlite on hand I will sift out the dust and throw some in the mix as well. That's it, nothing to it.

Green thumb, thanks for the welcome. What time of year did you root prune your Lychee? Did you get yours from the Urban Harvest Fruit Tree Sale?  I've noticed the water demand of these plants! My blueberries are exactly the same! Water every day it's over 90 degrees or they start to wilt in the heat. Thankfully this summer was mild compared to the last few. Hope that doesn't mean a long cold winter!!!!

I root pruned my Lychees at the same time I gave them a pruning - late July of this yr. I followed the advice of lycheesonline.com and lychee experts on this forum. Lycheesonline says to prune the branches post harvest, around mid-July (even if you didn't get any fruit that year). I pruned my mangoes about the same time too, just after I harvested the fruit (around Aug).

I wasn't brave enough to slice into the lychee root ball, and only cut off large pieces of matted roots or circling roots, and loosened up the root ball before re-potting. I'll try to cut into it more with my next re-potting.

No, I wasn't able to make it to the Urban Harvest Fruit Sale this year, but I did attend their pre-sale talk. I heard they had the most beautiful lychee trees which sold out within minutes of the sale opening! Is your beauty from them? I got both of mine as 3 gals from local nurseries around town. The Mauritius lychee is originally from Pine Island Nursery, Fl. and I'm not sure where the sweetheart is originally from.

Summer was not so bad this year, but i'm a little worried about winter. I've just started working on getting things ready for winter. I'm hoping we don't get those nasty dips we got last year. I recall a couple of nights I got to about 24-26 F.

Happy growing!!

[Rob1977]

I got my Sweetheart from the Galveston County Fruit Tree Sale. Urban harvest sells out to quick and I didn't get in line at 5:00 am like the year before. That's to way to do it man!!! You can get every thing you want if your one of the first 10 in line. What other fruits are you growing and what part of Houston are you in?

[Cassio]

Hi Cassio...Welcome to the forum! Good luck with your lychee trees  [/font][/size]

Thank you!
I can´t allow mine to grow like that! 

[Zambezi]

I got my Sweetheart from the Galveston County Fruit Tree Sale. Urban harvest sells out to quick and I didn't get in line at 5:00 am like the year before. That's to way to do it man!!! You can get every thing you want if your one of the first 10 in line. What other fruits are you growing and what part of Houston are you in?

I attended a presentation on Avocados at the Galveston County Agrilife Extension, just a week or so before the sale. They have some lovely fruit trees growing out there. Haha, yeah you have to get to the Urban harvest sale early, and all the sales always end up to be on the coldest mornings... You freeze your behind off just standing in line!!
I'm in the SW portion of Fort bend county. I did catch the bug really bad when I first started collecting. All I could think of was "one of everything please!!" But I'm doing a lot better now, well, hehe a little better!! I did a lot of gifting and now I am only growing plants that really make me happy. My more temperate fruit trees which include stone fruit trees, like peaches, plums, nectarines; I also grow citrus, pears, persimmons, olives, figs, pomegranates, bananas, mulberries and blueberries. Some of my tropical fruit trees include mangoes, longan, annonas, avocados, sapodillas, some eugenias, Jaboticabas, and many seedlings which I am still experimenting with. I also grow a few veggies and herbs, and some tropical spice trees.  

[Rob1977]

Doglips, very nice. Sounds like you got it going your way! Congrats, its a cool feeling when you get several years under your belt and finally have some big healthy fruit trees spitting out fruit. Its definitely a marathon and not a foot race. I'm just getting into the tropical so I'm in that one of every thing please mode. I was like that with Blueberries. Ive since been there and done that and finally calmed down. Settled on a few varieties after thinning my herd from 15 varieties and 50+ plants down to 10 plants that are really standouts. They are all mature plants now putting out lbs of fruit every spring. Then I got on the fig high and collected many of the sought after varieties. Now, all I can think about are MANGOS!!!!! Something very special about mangos, cant quite put my finger on it, buts special what ever it is!

[Cassio]

Well, here it goes my Lychees, both in containers.