The Tropical Fruit Forum

Until the drought killed my paw paw we had great crops every year from one tree.  It was a Corwin Davis seedling.  We rarely get below 26-28 degrees in the winter.  We are in the CA cool coast and our summer temperatures are usually in the 40s at night and a high in the mid 70s during the day, fog morning and night.  Don't think that it is accurate to say that the paw paw requires high temperatures to ripen, certainly its relative the cherimoya doesn't.  Cherimoyas are quite happy here, as was the paw paw.  Now most citrus does have difficulty ripening to full sweetness here.

One way to find out....ignore the naysayers and plant it. 

I do have sprouts coming up from the paw paw and will encourage them and increase the water.  It was a flavorable fruit and appreciated by most who tried it.

Summer heat hours info is straight from KSU. Personal correspondence. Posted in the temperate fruit forum.  Same basic story here: https://www.sfgate.com/homeandgarden/goldengategardener/article/San-Francisco-climate-not-the-best-for-pawpaw-3178485.php

Summer heat hours is not so much an issue of whether you can get fruit off of them, as the fruit quality.

I know nothing about how Corwin Davis fits into the chill/heat spectrum. The least heat-requiring cultivars are Pennsylvania Golden and KSU-Benson. But in San Diego, I expect the challenge to be about chill hours.

But sure, if you have land to experiment, nothing wrong with that 

Indeed - needs both chill and summer heat.  It's the latter that prevents me from growing them here.  They're quite temperature-hardy, but even the least heat-demanding cultivars can be hard to ripen in for the example the Pacific Northwest due to heat requirements.

Pawpaws are adapted to continental climates, where it gets both cold and hot.  That said, there are California pawpaw growers (for example, Lagier Ranch in the San Joaquin Valley), although I've never heard of any growing as far south as San Diego.  You can always contact KSU (the foremost experts in pawpaws) and ask.  But I imagine chill will be a big problem (in the SF area, both chill and heat can be problems, depending on the location and cultivar)

You'll have to look outside of annonaceae, unfortunately!  But feel free to assign me any database tasks you might have 

Thanks KarenRei for all your reseach !

According to my information it was not sure that E. hermaphroditum occurs in Iceland´s flora. Besides Empetrum hermaphroditum berries being a little bit larger, do you get any information about fruit quality differences between E. n. var. nigrum and E. n. hermaphroditum ?

I've been meaning to head out to my land but the weather's not been too great, and the evening is now too short after work to get much done, so that mainly pushes me off to weekends.  I want to do a berry survey while I'm there next time   

Unfortunately, I didn't find anything out about eating quality except for size.  Given that most people here seem completely unaware that there's two entirely different types of crowberries, they can't be that different! 

You don't have to "ferment" them (note: that's not fermentation, just dissolution, and it doesn't require frying, although it might speed up the process by oxidizing CaCO3 to CaO if hot enough and/or burning off the membrane).  But if you want to add calcium to your soil, eggshells are a calcium concentrate    Eggshells are basically calcium carbonate plated out around a thin organic membrane. Vinegar is a weak acid and dissolves the calcium carbonate, akin to acid rain dissolving limestone (which is also calcium carbonate).

Dissolving with eggshells with vinegar will create calcium acetate. Honestly, there are better anions than acetate for supplementing soil nutrients (sulfates, phosphates, nitrates...), and you definitely don't want residual acetic acid (would you dump plain vinegar on your soil? ), but it's certainly workable, and has a history of use. Soluble forms of calcium of course go straight to work in the soil. However, calcium carbonate itself is active in the soil - that's what agricultural lime is.  It just takes longer to act.  Also, it reduces soil acidity, while calcium acetate should be pH neutral.  But the effects are not going to be huge because you're not going to be using huge amounts.  If you're just talking kitchen waste, it's not going to be that much calcium, and even less effect on pH.

Doing some quick checking I see that the most desirable use for acetate fertilizers is for foliar sprays, due to their high solubility.  But again, you definitely don't want to be dumping residual vinegar on your plants.... unless you also are dumping some olive oil and calling it a salad    If you decide to dissolve eggshells in vinegar, make sure it's the *eggshells* that are in excess, not the vinegar!  If you want to speed up the reaction, in addition to grinding the eggshells as fine as you can, and heating as hot as you can get them, having the dissolution occur in hot vinegar will greatly speed up the process (and help make it more thorough). When I'm testing mineral samples for their calcium content, I always use hot vinegar rather than cold; cold will dissolve small calcite crystals, but its a much more vigorous, obvious reaction with hot vinegar.  Just be aware that hot vinegar is... well, pungent!

Simple solution:

Weboh: you were looking for banana plants with interesting looking fruit, correct?

My take on the question was that they were looking for a banana cultivar that had interesting-looking fruit.  Hence I gave examples of bananas with interesting-looking fruit.

One of the dominant characteristics of rutaceae (citrus family) is essential oil glands in the leaves (pellucid glands). Leaves could go a long way toward narrowing this down 

Thanks - good to know that G. intermedia is easy. 

Jabos extreme sensitivity to chlorine is well known. I'm really lucky that our tapwater up here isn't chlorinated.

I see there are a few banana plants on sale at Ken's Nursery: Musa Velutina and Royal Purple. Has anyone had these before? How do they taste? How do they compare to Cavendish bananas? I've had blue java banana and some type of dwarf red banana before and didn't really notice much of a difference. Based on that, do you think I would notice a difference in these? They look beautiful, anyway.

M. velutina = ornamental banana.  Possible to eat, but has numerous hard seeds.
Royal Purple = M. ornata = generally inedible fruit.

If you want good bananas that taste different from a cavendish, go with something in the mysore subgroup.

If you're up for holding a reservation until spring, that's a deal.    I'll take 2 lucs and 2 C. hirsuta.  Just PM me where to send payment. 

Luc's Garcinia  plants for sale, 15€ each, shipping excluded. Payment by PayPal (or bank to bank transfer, possible for € zone countries).
Shipping to EU countries.

I have interest.  Do you have any other plants or seeds for sale as well?

My only concern is the weather.  I'd have to hope that they kept them warm enough before I could get my hands on them 

To find a E. hermaphroditum plant in nature would be a bigger challenge. I assume best way to find are nurseries.

Just found this from Listigarður Akureyrar about E. nigrum ssp. hermaphroditum:

http://www.lystigardur.akureyri.is/default.aspx?modID=16&pId=3593&fl=1

"Algeng um land allt og þá ekki síst til fjalla. Önnur náttúruleg heimkynni t.d.: Arktísk, Kanada, N Ameríka, Evrópa (sérstakl. Skandinavía)"

Which is: "Widespread around the whole country and not least into the mountains. Other natural ranges include e.g. the arctic, Canada, North America, Europe (esp. Scandinavia)"

Apparently there are some visible differences between the two, not just the flowers - for example, the berries have the remains of stamens on the bottom.

I also found this:

https://www.ni.is/biota/plantae/anthophyta/empetrum-nigrum

Says:

"Krækilyngið skiptist í tvær deilitegundir, ssp. nigrum sem hefur einkynja blóm og finnst aðeins á láglendi og spp. hermaphroditum sem hefur tvíkynja blóm og grófari blöð, hún er sú deilitegund sem er miklu algengari hér, bæði til fjalla og á láglendi."

Which is:

"Crowberry bushes can be divided into two subdivisions, ssp. nigrum which has unisexual flowers and can only be found in the lowlands, and spp. hermaphroditum which has bisexual flowers and coarser leaves; this is the subdivision which is much more common here, both in the mountains and the lowlands."

I'll check which ones grow on my land the next time I'm out there.  Huh, I've really learned something in this thread, I always thought that crowberries here were just one variety    It's funny, if I go to images.google.com and search for "krækiber" I can clearly see that in some pictures all the berries have staminar remnants, while others clearly have none.  Apparently the proper names are krækilyng / krækiber for ssp. nigrum and krummalyng / krummaber for ssp. hermaphroditum, although I've never heard anyone use that term.  Other distinguishing characteristics beyond the stamnar remnants are wider, more elliptical leaves, and coarser stems which do not branch off roots. The berries are also slightly larger.