The Tropical Fruit Forum

Disagree re persimmons. I find them very easy to do... I have some to my 12 year old last year to teach him and he was 3/3 and I don't think the particularly cared, just wanted to be done so he could go back to what he wanted to do.

Apples are considered very forgiving - I taught my wife how to do several this past year with high success rate.

Figs are also forgiving, but easier to do for us in February or March when latex isn't so high but still great take rate.

Avos do well but are finicky and new growth is very susceptible to heat/high temps/heat waves

Stone fruit is also forgiving

Citrus has high success rate in spring and summer

Cherimoya also has high success rate.

Mangos are super forgiving for us in July and August

By forgiving, I mean high success despite your technique.

Good luck

When did you do your persimmons?  I've only tried doing D. kaki on D. lotus during spring, and somehow the timing never worked and it didn't take...

I've found Mexican Garcinia to be the hardiest in Northern California, in locations with no frost but generally cold winters.  Achachairus handled cold weather ok but would get yellow and decline whereas Mexican Garcinia seemed to be completely unaffected by cold weather (and also unaffected by dry spells).

Apples and stone fruit are the easiest I've grafted.  The hardest I've grafted are persimmons (they are very sensitive to timing).

Some, like avocados, are easy but require extremely fresh wood.

I remember years ago talking with Mark Albert (of Pineapple Guava fame), and he said that he used to run a commercial Avocado nursery in Santa Barbara where he would use a grafting sealer (I think it was Doc Farwell's), which he said is pretty much the same as diluted Elmer's Glue.  I've been meaning to try it out, because I sometimes have the same problem with buddy tape.  Parafilm cracks too easily and buddy tape never breaks apart...

Great work on the interior - lets see the outside! Looks like a daunting project, but the results are stunning. Wish I were ready for that step to buy, and in that area.

I don't have any particularly good outdoor shots but here's one panoramic with the house and patio.  The property goes both down an up from there about 75 feet in both directions, and I've really only planted a couple dozen trees on the property at the moment.

Hey Barath,

I'm kind of in a similar situation looking for that perfect microclimate and chunk of land. What resources did you find to be most helpful in determining the climate?  I've been using plantmaps and weather underground to try and get data, although, due to the high density of variable microclimates its hard to truly get a good depiction of what I might be dealing with.  Plant communities seem to be some of the most telling factors for me now.

Also, thanks for the rad plants you gave me at the DVC sale a few years ago!

Sure thing -- I miss getting to propagate plants at DVC...

I used similar resources -- lots of weather underground stations plus some of the Western Regional Climate Center data.  Back when wundermap existed in a usable form, I went through the historical data over a decade and then looked at the coldest and hottest days of each year and stepped through the hourly temperatures across all of SoCal for those days to see where extremes were.  From what I found, Mount Washington and the Hollywood Hills were consistently the warmest on the coldest nights.  (There are a few other similar pockets, but less consistent, such as in Fallbrook.)  Coastal Santa Monica and a few other coastal locations are also relatively warm on cold nights, but especially on still-air nights the Hollywood Hills and Mount Washington benefit from their elevation and the inversion layer brings their temperatures up to the 50s or even 60s while other areas are in the 30s.  The other nice thing is that Mount Washington is in the wind shadow of the San Gabriels so it doesn't get the extreme Santa Ana wind speeds that other areas get...

A couple years ago I spent a long time house hunting in LA to find a place with the perfect combination of microclimate for tropical growing, enough land to plant my hundreds of trees, walkability to the metro, easy access to the freeway, good schools, quiet neighborhood, and the rest.  And I found it, in the Mount Washington neighborhood.  It was a classic 100 year old house that needed some work with two south-facing downslope parcels of land just a 10 minute walk from the metro gold line (and 9 minutes by train to downtown) and just a couple miles on the 110 from the heart of the city.  Plus it's just a few minutes walk from the excellent local elementary school.  But when we started doing work on the house, it turned out we needed to carefully rebuild the entire house from scratch, which is what we spent the last two years doing, piece by piece, from the bones on up.

The house is great now, but we're exhausted in every way.  So we're selling it.  I'm posting about it here in the hopes that some rare fruit grower will want it (either you all or someone you know), because I hate to see such prime land going to someone who won't value the land and microclimate.  It's solidly Zone 11a -- one of the few SoCal neighborhoods that is -- plus it gets the right amount of warmth to get great growth on tropicals.  (I studied years of weather station data from every station in the area to figure this out...)  The land is officially 1/4 acre but functionally 1/2 acre given the unused land around it.  And we rebuilt the house to be what we wanted rather than what a house flipper would do, so we spared no expense (everything from solid oak floors to a 5.28 kW solar array to new copper plumbing, electrical, windows, doors, kitchen, bathrooms, appliances, foundation bolting and footings and huge beams -- really everything...).  House is 1729 sq ft, 3 bedroom / 2 bath plus a den.

I'm not a pro photographer and the listing -- which will go up soon -- will have proper pictures, so here's just two, one from downstairs and one upstairs.

If you're interested please message me.  Thanks.

Governors plum and blackberry jam make good hedges here. Very dense, bushy plants with fruit frequently. Not everyone is convinced by the fruit quality of blackberry jam but it always has fruit and the flowers are very nice.
Peter

Interesting -- never heard of blackberry jam fruit hedges...

Quote from: Mistozy on December 29, 2019, 09:36:22 PM

I plan on using moringa trees for a hedge, since they have a really fast growth rate. I'm starting them from seeds right now indoor, and am aiming for a few feet growth this next year.

They (moringa) grow like 10ft a year.  It turns into a pretty big plant.  I did grow it but the taste is so bad I got rid of them.  They dont stay looking nice during winter either.

Strawberry guava and pineapple guava grow fast and make handsome evergreen bushes.  They are also quite hardy and not picky about water.  Thry stay looking beautiful all year.  Citrus can be kept like a bush also.

I've been leaning towards Citrus lately because you're right it can work as a bush and grow fast.

I don't get that fast of growth on Pineapple or Strawberry/Lemon Guava, at least not as fast as other things, but otherwise they would be perfect.  I guess I'm hoping for something that grows at the rate of White Sapote or Papaya but stays in a bush-like form.

Does your city maintain the fruit tress?  How do they manage the park and picking and all of that?  I'd like to see more public orchards and am curious about how cities elsewhere handle them.

** UPDATE: GONE **

Free for anyone will take all of these at the same time:

Dwarf Brazilian Banana (15 gallon pot, about 8 feet tall)
Mysore Banana (5 gallon pot, about 6 feet tall)
Achachairu seedlings (sharing a 5 gallon pot)
Mexican Garcinia seedlings (sharing a 5 gallon pot)

Pickup from San Juan Capistrano, CA.  Send me a message if you can come by today, tomorrow, or Saturday.

What's the story on Leavens Hass? Can't find anything on this....

It's one that Jack has been distributing from the originator on the California Central Coast.  Maybe Jack will chime in about it if he sees this.