The Tropical Fruit Forum

Dang! How do I get one of those???

Is there any ilustrated  chart or catalog/handbook describing the varieties of pineapples ?

I have the same question... Some resources I found:
- https://www.growables.org/information/TropicalFruit/pineapple.htm (has a varieties list sub-page)
- https://www.ars.usda.gov/pacific-west-area/hilo-hi/daniel-k-inouye-us-pacific-basin-agricultural-research-center/tropical-plant-genetic-resources-and-disease-research/docs/pineapple-collection/ (not too useful for ID, has too many varieties :-) and not all that much descriptive info)
- https://crfg.org/wiki/fruit/pineapple/ (not much info)

Glad to have found my old friends at the old citrus forum. Would be glad to meet new friends and fellow enthusiasts here.

Whoa! Nice to see you here, welcome!

I'm pretty new here but have now posted 61 messages, so I thought I might as well post a little intro thread with some images. We're in the mountains just north of Santa Barbara, California at 2100' (640m). We get marine influence but a lot more heat at daytime and typically colder at night time than down by the coast. Sometimes it's foggy and humid, specially at night and morning, other times it can be very dry with little measurable relative humidity.

We get some light frost most years, and fewer and fewer years with real frost. We planted some low-medium chill stone fruit in 2002 and they gave us great fruit for a number of years, but the last 5 years have been very spotty. Global warming at work...
One of the challenges we have is daily winds in the late afternoon that can be quite strong. Anything with delicate foliage just gets shredded if it's not protected. It's not the wind speed per-se, it's the daily occurrence that gets the plants.

Here's the very beginning of the orchard in 2002, making terraces by hand and planting the typical citrus one finds in the nurseries:


Eight years later, the trees had grown nicely and we planted more:




Nice Algerian Clementine harvest 9 years after initial planting:


The soil is basically sand from all the boulders that you see around. We're on a sandstone escarpment and there's only a thin layer of organic matter. Depth of soil before hitting rock is a couple of feet, as in 2-3 feet... We got a lot of tree chips from clearing and from a number of pines that succumbed to a borer. I deliberately installed sprinkler irrigation so the mulch gets water year round and decomposes nicely. Now the soil around the oldest trees is really, really nice. We use no fertilizers other than mulch and compost and no pesticides.

We kept expanding the orchard, this was 3 years ago:






And some of the most recent trees in 2018, citrus from CCPP budwood grafted onto C-35 and some Pomegranates:


A few months ago:

Yes, the trees have more of an ocean view than our house...

Of course all this looks bucolic, but the grim reality is often different. All the above photos are really of a war zone. It's us vs. them. Thankfully there aren't a lot of "them" interested in the citrus, but that's not the case for the other trees.

Persian Mulberry:


Nectarines:


Fig:


I'm skipping the images of the gopher traps, which are deployed somewhere virtually year-round.

An as a true addict I have the next set of grafted trees in the greenhouse:


More to follow...

Interesting! I have a 1-year old valentine in the ground and just grafted cocktail, but not on the same tree... -8C is possible here, but very uncommon, I hope the trees grow big before that happens, if it does.
What frost cover do you use, is that spun polyester or plastic? I can't quite tell from the photo. Also, I wonder whether it would help to keep it a little away from the plant?
I did some measurements with a medium-weight spun poly floating row cover draped over a small banana. The result was the same inside temperature as outside, but those measurements were above freezing. On their own these covers do not increase the minimum temperature. There has to be something else that raises the temp and then the cover helps a little to keep that in. I have the feeling it's quite tricky to ensure that there is this "something else" and a tiny tree like you have or the small banana that I was trying to protect just don't have it. For next winter I'll have to read-up on the best way to combine irrigation with cover and stuff like that, or resort to xmas illumination under the covers...  Fortunately we mostly don't really need it, but I'd like to understand it better.

spaugh, any idea yet about the level of humidity on hot&dry days? Or did you just ditch the misting this winter? I'm wondering what I can do in terms of hoop house or similar in the summer to increase humidity without spending a lot of water and without having to run big fans for cooling due to plastic covering, etc. I.e., I'm wondering what the minimum is to create a bit of a microclimate that captures the plant transpiration...

The static old citrus forum site is awesome! The gardenweb -> houzz transition not so much... While we're on that topic, I'm new here and have been wondering about the future. Who pays for this forum and who manages backups? I.e., what are the chances someone will need to set-up a static archive copy of this forum in 5 years time? I tried to find an answer but I don't see anything mentioned anywhere...

Cool heater!
If you heat-exchange to a liquid, do you end up with more long-wave radiation than if you had just an air-air heat exchange? Is that easier to keep contained in the GH or harder?
If you have hot water you can heat the soil, but I don't know up to what point that's beneficial...
Have you had a condensing heater of some form? I did and I'm glad I no longer have. It was a total disaster from a maintenance point of view (corrosion).

Did you see a video/image showing the 'after'? Did any of these take? How does the tree look like 2-3 years later?

I agree that it's not the most useful tree/fruit, however:
- it's prolific, lots of fruit year round even on a small tree
- it looks beautiful, much nicer shape than a lemon, at least in my experience
- it's a fruit you don't find for pennies at the supermarket
- it has a distinctive taste that you can't substitute with lemon or lime, e.g. in ice cream or a tart
So our tree is definitely here to stay, but I would definitely get a lime and lemon first...

So, basically, I was wrong.
It seems that some tropical/subtropical plants can indeed be cultivated in my house, as long as they do have some wind resistance. My goal now is to find those grafted varieties that actually bear descent fruits!

Welcome to the forum! Your English is excellent!

It sounds like your first step should be to plant windbreaks. What do farmers on the island use for that purpose? Plant some! Yes, it will take a long time before you have a real wind break, it's an investment into the future, but once the plants get tall you will be so happy. (You can always plant some bamboo, I guess, I'm having decent luck with B. Oldhamii and I hear B. Textilis work well too.)

Me neither