The Tropical Fruit Forum

I bought 5 new citrus trees, planted 1 (fairchild mandarin) but I have my doubts about the soil they were grown in. The soil looks like 60/40 wood chips/sand which is an "industry standard" but only because it's cheap and light. Wood chips are great for 6-12 months but then they break down and turn into muck. If you have light soil with great drainage then it might not matter but if you have heavy soil the muck surrounding the root ball might cause problems. In my case I'm planting on a hillside so they are most likely fine to plant but I was just wondering how risky it would be to bare root a 15 gallon citrus. I've bare rooted 2 five gallon home depot citrus trees before and they are growing well but I suspect 15 gallons might require a different strategy.  I'm guessing that it would be better to bare root a 15gal citrus in the winter, summer time bare rooting might just be asking for trouble.

I was just wondering if anybody had any citrus bare rooting experience or stories.

Last year I posted about Gophinator (Trapline) traps and at the time I wasn't that impressed with them. After catching 9 gophers with some new gophinator traps I can say they are much better than macabee traps. Every feature of the gophinator trap is better but one feature that stands out is the trigger bar. I can only make educated guesses on why the trigger bar is better than a trigger plate (macabee) but I suspect that when a gopher sees the plate they see an almost filled in hole so they figure they will just fill in the rest resulting in many empty traps. When they see the bar I think they inspect it to see how they should deal with closing the hole which results in more trapped gophers.

Last year I caught 30-50 gophers with Macabee and Cinch traps. This year I won't even waste my time putting anything but a trapline product in a gopher hole. Cinch traps work but they are so inconvenient to setup and the corrosion resistance is horrible which causes even more setup issues. 

Fruitlovers nursery sells them but they might be out of season now. I received an order of abiu from fruitlovers around February. Also they are recalcitrant seeds so they need to be shipped as fast as possible.

http://www.fruitlovers.com/seedlistUSA.html

I've caught 35-40 gophers this year, mostly with Macabee traps and a few Cinch traps. Recently I just bought 4 Trapline traps to try them out. So far I've caught nothing with them but I will keep trying, only good thing I can say about them is they have excellent corrosion resistance and are easy on the wallet. Cinch traps are costly and have no corrosion resistance so you are always using sandpaper on the critical parts. Macabee has just always worked  for me even when they are rusted.

https://ericksonfarm.3dcartstores.com/Sapodilla_c_6.html
Simon, I get them from Erickson farm every year. They are very good.

Unfortunately most fruit sellers wont ship to CA

I would advise against putting organic material deeper than 10-12" in the soil. Air has trouble penetrating past 8-12" so you might be creating a future muck pit where anaerobic bacteria thrive. I've never used the lasagna method but I've only ever seen it on raise beds/hugelkultur where aeration isn't a problem.

If you want to add water retention to soil then biochar might be the best long term solution. If you want to add aeration to soil then raising the planting location and adding pumice or rice hulls would work.

The digging you did seems like a great start to loosening up the soil. These ideas are not my own, more information can be found here regarding soil > http://www.lagunahillsnursery.com/SOIL-INFO.html

velvet apple/Mabolo (Diospyros discolor, Diospyros blancoi)

http://tropicalfruitforum.com/index.php?topic=29528.msg333102#msg333102

From what I've heard, velvet apple doesn't taste like persimmon

There is also Diospyros nigra and Diospyros kaki (http://tropicalfruitforum.com/index.php?topic=27250.msg314408#msg314408)

Seedling is the way to go, one seedling that I planted this year is already 4 feet tall. There are also people here who sell jackfruit scions so you could plant seedlings and graft.

I am also interested in fresh starfruit seeds. If you graft a standard size starfruit tree onto dwarf rootstock, do you get a dwarf tree?

The jackfruit taproot is aggressive. 10-14" tall grape vine pots give the taproot more room to establish. I've had growth stall by staying in a 10" pot for too long (over 1 month) but I haven't had leaves fall off when they stalled so it might be a soil issue.

looking for 10-30 seeds.