Quote from: venturabananas on July 06, 2016, 08:15:43 PM

BTW, with a tree this size or smaller, I find it easier to skip the bird netting and use drawstring organza bags on individual fruit as they get close to ripe.  They are cheap and you avoid the problem of having to fish birds out of the netting.

100% agreed. I have done both bird netting (which is a huge PITA) and organza bags for figs. I only do the latter now. And with a small tree like VdB, that is definitely the best/easiest way to go.

Where can said bags be purchased? I've read of people making their own, but I am not up for that ...

Ventura- how much sun does your VDB get?

I live in Michigan where there is supposed to be an abundance of Asimina triloba, but I have still yet to find any wild. I am going to be buying a few trees of named varieties to plant in my yard but would like to at least try a wild fruit or find a wild stand. Every time I drive southward I look for them but end up finding none. Anyway, they seem to be more rare than people let on.

I hear ya...I have read many accounts of wild patches that are so full of ripe fruit that you can smell it from a distance. If these do exist, recent reading has lead me to believe that it must be more in the Ohio-West Virginia - Pennsylvania - Maryland area. We have a good number of pawpaws here in my area but finding fruit is not particularly common. Usually the trees are very small and in the understory. Patches that have fruit are ones on the edge of fields where they are lucky enough to get decent sunlight.

Goog - yeah I read some reference to grinding up bugs on some website while researching some other issue (oh - i think maybe it was mashing up slugs as a deterrent to their kin)....guy said it didn't work.
I may try your idea on these arthropods, though!

For the moment it's possible that run-of-the-mill insecticidal soap may be working as a preventative. So far so good, or could be some other coincidental factor.

Here is a shot of the first bloom on my Iridescence vine. Beautiful deep purple! interesting cleft stigmas!



I hand-pollinated it with stuff from a different vine. We'll see...so far all of my vines have dropped their first 1-2 flowers even with pollination. I suspect this may be normal.

Well, things are in full swing here with my Maypops. I've had probably 6 or so blooms across all my vines (not counting the seedlings that flowered early due to stress, I believe).
I have one fruit set on my oldest vine, which overwintered last year. All other vines are seedlings except for the "Iridescence" vine I ordered from Brushwood.

I wanted to post about a very annoying Maypop pest that's driving me a little nuts.

I will try to post a picture soon, but they are small (1/8 inch), oblong shaped, golden/tan colored beetles with black legs and antennae. I have yet to identify them. They sit almost exclusively on the undersides of leaves and eat small holes in them. If you get too close to the bug or shake the leaf, they will hop off like a flea.
They can be ambushed and squished by hand with about a 75% success rate. But their relatives are always back for more later.
I spoke to another passiflora grower here in Tennessee and he has them too. They don't totally defoliate the vines, they just make for ugly leaves.
I have found them in flowers too, so not sure if they can potentially damage fruit. (I have also found holes bored in flower buds, but not sure who the culprit is).

My point in posting this is to see if anyone has any ideas about: 1) what these are; and 2) how to get rid of them "organically"

I have tried cayenne pepper, insecticidal soap, and a hot pepper spray with no apparent results.

Well, my little VDB fig is back at it's odd problems.

After a near-total loss last year (weird issues above, plus an attack of Fig Rust after that), I took Rob's advice and pruned it back by about 25-30% and also did significant root pruning early this year.

It seemed to really appreciate the treatment and put on a decent amount of new growth. It has set 20+ figs on the new growth and they are maybe 1cm in diameter. They are starting to darken already.

My issue, though, is that something else seems to be attacking the tree again this year. It's not the Rust from last year.
Over the last couple of weeks I've noticed one or 2 leaves yellowing and falling off.
Today I noticed 2 of the bigger/older leaves are yellowing and this one fell off into my hand:



Any ideas?

Attempted my first ever grafts today. Since I don't have any trees or graft-worthy seedlings of my own, my only option when I received some budwood in the mail was to graft some wild trees.

I studied some chip budding videos on YouTube. Didn't seem too hard. I practiced a bit on some twigs before going out. I put a new utility blade in my Gerber folding knife and got some parafilm.

My first couple of live attempts didn't go so well- whittled one bud off as the blade got away from me and snapped one stick of budwood too. After that it went better. I didn't count - maybe 6-7 grafts, a couple on small suckers and some on branches of mature trees.
I did one NC-1, several Sunflower and 1 or 2 Overleese.

By way of status update on the wild trees - I was a little saddened to see some dropped baby fruit clusters on the ground and some dangling loosely on branches that fell with the slightest touch.

I wonder if this is all due to environmental stress (it's been pretty dry for 2 weeks) or could it be that these were self-pollinated flowers that aborted? Not sure if self-pollination would even make baby fruits. ..

Not even cacao tastes like chocolate, so why should black sapote?

I see what you mean. I think it's just because of the folklore of the chocolate taste.

There is a lot of variation in taste from tree to tree, especially since most trees planted are seedlings. There are improved cultivars and some grafted trees out there.

Makes sense - good to know.

Any thoughts on whether I should cut the flowers (spent ones and forming ones) on these vines?
They are only 3 months old and some have already set (and I pollinated) 2 flowers.
Vegetative growth seems to have drastically slowed. Now that they're in the ground, however, I'm not sure what they'll do. Not sure they'd even hold fruit at this age anyway.
The goal for these particular vines is to cover a fence and flower as much as possible. Probably a tall order for their first year (?)

Impatient as I am, I made the hard call to cut all flowers off the vines. We'll see how they respond....

Any thoughts on whether I should cut the flowers (spent ones and forming ones) on these vines?
They are only 3 months old and some have already set (and I pollinated) 2 flowers.
Vegetative growth seems to have drastically slowed. Now that they're in the ground, however, I'm not sure what they'll do. Not sure they'd even hold fruit at this age anyway.
The goal for these particular vines is to cover a fence and flower as much as possible. Probably a tall order for their first year (?)

Thanks for the input.
I am testing a variation of this theory in 2 pots as of last night. there were a few nodes very low on the stem where leaves had been dropped - I trimmed these with a sharp knife and then buried the stem (vertical planting position) up to the highest of these nodes.

I have 2 more vines I want to transplant into the ground and I may try a more aggressive version of this and plant it horizontally.

By way of additional background, I had someone advise me that burying the stem in any way was not a good idea. So I guess I don't like "no" for an answer...

My seedlings bloomed yesterday - I was expecting one flower to open but instead I got 3.

It was sort of like roulette - I didn't know what the flowers would look like since they came from my 'Alba' (white) vine's fruit but were pollinated by a purple-flowered variety. I figure somewhere in the genetics at least some offspring would be white, but what I got appears to be a blend of purple and white. Very pretty in my opinion!
I have already cross pollinated these 3 vines with each other, so I presume that F2 generation would have a greater chance of producing solid-white flowers.

I hope letting these flower so soon won't be detrimental to their overall vigor this year. I am FINALLY going to plant them out today.

My apologies, my language was a bit strong. It's a little rough being a newbie on this forum, I realize I haven't earned my stripes, but I should probably guard against divisive language. Thanks Triloba.

No no - you're totally fine. My initial response sounded snarky actually, when no snark was intended.