The Tropical Fruit Forum

I am Jimmy
Live in Boynton Beach, FL about 2 or 3 blocks west of I-95 and maybe 2 miles from ocean.
Have 7 thriving mangoes in my yard - Wally (bought from Lawrence Zill's place about 50 yrs ago), Fairchild, Pickering, Glenn, Coconut Cream, Nam Doc Mai #4, Lemon Zest. 
Also have planted at my son's house a Pickering, Nam Doc, and a Cogshall.
Last summer did a lot of grafting.   Mostly making my own scions and grafting to my other trees.   Bad success rate tho' - about 6 out of 30.
Also have a 4 month old Pineapple Pleasure in a pot which is mysteriously diseased - just posted a plea for help on this one.

Hi Jimmy. Is you're mysteriously diseased pineapple turning yellow and red down its leaves? I usually give iron for that. I use old steel wool pads for that. Purple? It wants potassium. They like really acidic conditions. After a couple days with no rain is the soil around it dry? Or damp and cool? Might have a fungal disease. Goodluck with little plant

I am currently thinking about adding a Dolgo Crab to my orchard as it has large crabapples and an extended bloom time. Right now I have about a dozen apples in 45-55 gallon pots in my front yard facing the lake. Trying to rember all the varieties but not sure of it- 2 pound sweets,2 golden grimes, 2Reverend Morgans (developesd in hot Texas) 2 brogdens (developed in hot Alabama) and a 3 in one-Anna, Dorset Gold, Fuji. Need to net them Up to keep the sqourrells off-they are taking a bite and leaving the ruined fruit behind. Also have low chill peaches, an olive, 2 mulberries, and 3 figs & avocado, plus multiple pineapples and yacon growing mostly in pots.

I would be very interested in purchasing one also, and even willing to trial it in my nematode riddled ground. Probably in my Zone 10 cabin yard.

Info I had was the berries are only viable for 24 hours or so. We raised a replacement from windfall a couple times, then for some reason nothing sprouted before one died off. I now have a nursery-bought replacement.

Quote from: Tropheus76 on June 17, 2015, 07:48:19 AM

Wow, I wasn't aware there were that many low chill apple varieties available for us here in FL. I get fruit off my Anna and einschmeir, and blooms off my tropic sweet. I had dorsetts but they both kinda went down this year and I replaced them with persimmons. I do have two spots open so I will look into those other varieties and see whats available.

King David fruited but the raccoons got em. Terry Winter Keeper set a batch of fruit we lost in a winter windstorm.  Had several blossom when nothing else was blooming to hand fertilize with.
I originally typed a whole long response into my cellphone Tuesday afternoon- I see it never went thru now.

I am a newby, but I am only a little north of you- a half hour from the nw corner of Lake Okeechobee. Check out www.chestnuthilltreefarm.com They have worked on blight proof chestnuts that will grow in FL for years.  (I've never bought any from them)
Next, I have killed a LOT of plants trying to grow in the sugar sand that is full of nematodes and funguses. My answer has been to grow in containers. I go to a real nursery (not home depot or lowes) and buy 35 gallon and up pots for my trees. Yes, I have a Pachira Nut in a 50 gallon pot. It looks similar to a chestnut and is better suited to our extreme climate. My apples, figs,peaches,  yacon, blueberries, blackberries, etc are all in pots. I don't use potting soil- it doesn't give enough support to shrubs/trees/corn, and dries out within a day of being watered. I use 1/2 miraclegro garden soil and 1/2 black kow. Also, if there is a shortage of pots- like when I pruned the suckers off the roots of my apples- I buy 17gallon pots from the storage department at Walmart or KMart, cut drainage holes 2 inches up the sides and plant in them.

Hello to all apple lovers, especially you fellow Floridians. I am just northwest of Lake Okeechobee and I wanted to share with you a wonderful website I discovered  about 6-7 years ago. www.kuffelcreek.com He grows apples in the tropics - he himself started out growing them in California, and for years he had a picture of his backyard full of fruiting apple trees and the thermometer at 113. You read his explanation of chill hours and it turns out that what chill hours do is synchronize bloom, fruit set and harvest.  Important if you're a commercial grower, less important if you just want apples whenever the tree provides them. He says in the hot zones you can have bloom, ripe fruit, and green fruit all on the tree at the same time. He also lists his favorite hot weather apples, the ones that taste good and do well, and Fiji does grow well in the heat, - but doesn't fruit till it's 5 years old. We had a 3 in 1 low chill apple that produced a flush of Anna apples and the raccoons got them just as they started to ripen. That straggled along and died a few years later. I have discovered that this sugar sand doesn't work for most of my fruits- so now I am growing them in 35 gallon containers. I bought Grandfatherbear another 3 in 1 apple at his request, but this time it's in a pot. This year I planted summer champion, pound sweet, another William's Pride  and brogden (low chill from Alabama). Last year I planted King David, Arkansas Black, Hoover (low chill from coastal SC) Victorian Limbertwig, White Winter Pearman, and Golden Grimes.  Now, Golden Grimes is my favorite. Doesn't ship well because it is so tender, but tastes wonderful and makes translucent applesauce. It was a parent of Golden Delicious.Wealthy and Terry Winter Keeper also. I also have a William's pride that's a few years older-maybe 4 or 5 years old?   I strongly encourage you to visit the Kuffel Creek website and then check old the book Old Southern Apples by Lee Calhoun. It has guided a LOT of my choices. I bought the Kuffel Creek book about growing in the city years back- really need to buy his book about growing apples in the tropics now. He has gone into the apple in the tropics business bigtime- he is consulting with tropical African and SE Asian growers. I bought  most of my apples from www.bighorsecreekfarm.com or Raintree Nursery. Highly recommend both their businesses. Next year's order from Bighorsecreekfarm is the Rev Morgan, a low chill apple from South Texas, more Golden Grimes, King David, and ....I forgot the last variety. I'm sure I ordered 4.
I'm just a newby here but I've been working on my apples for quite a while now. Pettingill, my original 3 in 1 anna, dorset, ein schmeir, yellow transparent, and separate trees of anna and dorset died within a few weeks of planting in the ground here. As I said, I'm now doing the 35 gallon pots, and they are living and every now and then I get bloom- and have some apples started on the Terry Winter (which lost green fruit in a winter gale)

Oh, columnar apples- I gave Scarlet Sentineland Golden Sentinel to my dd and family when they moved to their townhouse in South Carolina. They planted them in small half barrels- I really am not even sure they were 12 gallons. As long as I got up there to fertilize them in the spring and they got watered onc a week they would bear a handful of fruit apiece. The Golden did grow one branch like a second trunk. I think they may have gotten more with larger pots and more fertilizer. I try to add 8-8-8 to my apples, and keep Grandfatherbear from applying Miraclegro- because I read somewhere they don't like nitrogen (but nitrogen degrades quickly in our Florida heat- I have taken to giving lots of nitrogen tomy Irish potatoes in winter, and my yield went up from 1-2 per plant to 6-10 per plant!) Maybe I should rethink the Miraclegro ban.

Not sure what the proper terminology is, but this is new this year.
For 20 years we've replanted the crown of the pineapple after eating. And Grandfatherbear asked me to stop whacking off the new plant that grew from where we had harvested the old plant. So now we have a lot of pineapples that are 2 plants high...and suddenly, they are all growing little pineapple crowns from about 2/3 way up the plant. I snapped 6 pups off one mother, and planted- they were about 3- 3 1/2 inches long, I was about to do more but it occurred me they might need to be bigger before being snapped off and transplanted.
So how big should they be?

Yes, I just recently joined. But my sign-in was good for tropical fruits, citrus, temperate fruits. Then I moved to the Vegetable board and my login changed to Guest.
I tried to log in and was told my user name didn't exist.
So I tried to reregister and was told that I didn't answer the confirmation questions properly. Well, the letters were exact, no problem there. But AFTER the letters, the second question was- What color is an onion? Off hand, I can think of white, yellow, green, and red. Maybe purple. But there are gray shallots. Does that count??
Apparently, onions are some other color than the ones I know.
I kinda DID want to participate in the discussions there. But since I can't sign in there, I can't ask what the deal is. So I'm up here in the Fruits forum, wanting to know what the deal is on the Tropical Vegetables forum.
Hope someone can explain it to me. I'll check back in tomorrow.

Grandfatherbear is a FL native, and I grew up in Northern VA/WASH DC. We met at Stetson University, DeLand, FL in 1970. My father was a career agricultural economist with USDA and every vacation was a busman's holiday. I have been a long term gardener- GFB loves all his plants and knows the location of every leaf and bud and developing fruit. I studied gardening like a second career after experiencing some massive fails. Now that I'm retired, I vowed to treat gardening like a 40 hr a week job. My more recent goals have been to get more into perennials and tropical vegetables. Learnt the hard way that growing a summer vegetable garden just means a huge pest load for the autumn gardens so have scaled back the summer plantings. Im getting more interested in tropical nuts with this whole drought in CA thing and the tripling of nut prices on the wholesale level. Our plantings include a huge apple orchard of various heirloom apples (www.kuffelcreek.com hot climate apple production) low chill peaches and apricots, mulberries, jaboticabas, dovyalis, carambola, curry, terminalia (okari), Malabar chestnut (pachira) water chestnuts, arrowhead, lotus, ornamental rice, canna, loofa squash, asparagus, Chaya, chayote, katuk, sweet potatoes, black peanut, pigeon peas. In winter I do the usual ordinary vegetables.