The Tropical Fruit Forum

I saw a photo on the forum where someone was growing trees in Air-Pots but I can't find the image anymore to ask the person who posted the photo. I have been considering them myself but they are expensive. I do read they are reusable.

1) Are they any better than other methods for trees not yet in the ground?
2) I see some for sale on Amazon but is there a better source?
3) How do you get the plants out of them when you are ready to plant? Aren't the roots growing through the holes?

I'm thinking of buying some for very small seedlings and more for 1-2 year trees.

Just curious if the hype is everything you watch in the videos.

Quote from: Bill Blevins on February 19, 2018, 08:41:01 AM

Quote from: Triloba Tracker on February 17, 2018, 12:31:13 PM

I’m doing in the woods. Hundreds of trees out there,  so a map is not feasible.

Do you have a mobile phone signal where you are working on the trees? ie: can you visit a website on your smartphone while you are out in the woods?

Yep...

There is a button on Plants Map edit pages to use your phone GPS to locate where you are standing to map plants in the field. It actually works really good in town and gets the pin within 5-10 feet. The problem is out in the forest where there is no signal, it gets sketchy and the pins aren't as close. I usually pin a tree from my phone in the field and then come back to a computer or my tablet and fine tune it. Here is an example of a trail someone made in the woods https://www.plantsmap.com/organizations/grelen-nursery

The first of my PlantsMap tags just came in... super excited!

Wow. Nice mounting job! That is how Florida Tech Botanical Garden is mounting theirs. Can I use one of those photos to show mounting options?

Your tags are cut from a 0.040" aluminum sheet that has been coated with a surface called UltraBlack. It is military spec satin black surface that is in simulated testing (ongoing) for 12+ years and is showing no degradation after temp extremes, uv and chemical exposure, etc. This surface is what is used to label the outside of aircraft parts. Our partners at Goodwill Industries use a C02 laser to etch through the black surface to expose the aluminum underneath. Unless you hit it with your shovel or weed trimmer it should last for years. Our friend who owns Lark Label has customers with the same material and some are are 20 years old and they still look new. At our botanical garden, we clean the tags once a year with regular windex - usually the weekend before a big garden tour

I'm still very interested in setting up a fogging system for my greenhouse.

I'm looking for a small scale fogging system that lets me spray 5 seconds every 30 minutes like what you find in the produce section in a grocery store. This would be for a small propagation box/tent and not for a whole greenhouse. If anyone sees anything like that when you are poking around the Internet...

If the tree in your photos is a Prunus mume, you can prune it significantly without harming the tree.

Do that either right after the flowering period in the late winter or in the late Fall after the leaves drop and when the tree is dormant if you don't care about seeing the flowers.

These are often grown for the flowers rather than the fruit, so most people prune after the flowering period but these people aren't usually trying to collection scion wood so I'm not sure of the proper time if you want to graft what you cut.

Some cultivars are popular for bonsai.

Prunus mume grows quite fast and some cultivars will put on as much as 5-7 feet per year for the first few years. Prune back 2/3 of the new growth (after it flowers if you are into seeing those) and it should be fully leafed out again by mid-summer.

I just lost a 3 year old tree that had been growing nicely. I think it was a soil / root problem combined with August heat last year and probably lack of watering. It died very quickly.

I now have 5 different cultivars that I grew in pots for the past couple of years and they are still small. I just planted them in the yard last fall so I have not seen them bloom yet in their new locations, but they are full of buds. I believe that all of them were grafts. None have fruited yet. I think I remember that they take about 4 years to start producing fruit.

I have not met anyone who says the fruit from Prunus mume tastes good.

We'll see.

Bill Blevins
PlantsMap.com
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