Anyone know of a place selling Indian mangoes in Miami-Dade (or if I were so lucky, Monroe County) in FL?

Anyone here ever successfully sprout such a mango seed purchased from a local store?

I have a Kesar tree, but it's only the first year in the ground here, and did not push out flowers anyway. So I've still never tasted one, but I'm generally a fan of Indian mangoes. I miss my days in the NYC tri-state area when I could get a variety of Indian mangoes right down the street, and for decent prices... I used to buy a box at a time! But alas, there is barely any Indian population way down here in extreme SFL.

Since somebody has reintroduced this thread, I thought I would point out that waiting can eventually lead to something. After more than two years of waiting in-ground, my Maha Chanok has finally pushed its first ever flowers just this week! I don't know that it will hold even one fruit on its own this year, but I'm relieved it finally did something. It remains one of the slowest growing plants I have in my whole yard, almost never flushing leaves or anything. I was starting to wonder if it was plastic, because it always looks the same. So that was a labor of love that has gotten somewhere.

Also, after more than a year my dwarf Namwah finally gave its second ever round of fruit. The plant was nearly decimated in a flood we had recently (salt water - thanks sea level rise!), which happened literally the day after the flower finally showed!, so I thought it was a goner. But it seems that while the plant the hands are on lost all its leaves and cannot seem to make any more, the babies it has on the mat are making food for it and trying to keep the fruit going with the few leaves they themselves have left.

Additionally, my row of Moringas all suddenly made a ton of pods, which is great because they have been flowering for maybe a year and a half and only made one pod in a previous flush. I could not understand what was wrong. Moreover, those seeds have not yet sprouted, so I was worried. But now there are a horde of baby pods, and I am guessing this had only to do with a need to reach more maturity before it could really hold pods. Hopefully they stay growing on the trees, because I have yet to eat either a pod or a seed, only the leaves and flowers so far. I look forward to trying some new permutations of Moringa!

Have patience, people. And plant plenty of vegetables, like katuk, tropical tomatoes (fruiting profusely right now), and other short-term plants to tide you over.

Spray with Neem oil - no poisons needed. Diatomaceous earth can also help keep them away.

Quote from: LivingParadise on January 19, 2017, 09:43:45 AM

Quote from: bsbullie on January 18, 2017, 07:44:47 AM

You dont want to let them get soft on the tree. Not only will they be prime candidate for burds, squirrels and insects if done so but you will find that they will become splatter marks on the ground more often than not.

Just bag them... then they will have no pest issues, and will not fall to the ground if they come off the branch. I do it with all my fruit, so they can get as ripe as possible on the tree.

Not all fruit benefits from getting what one would call "fully ripe" and soft on the tree till it falls on their own.

Hey, you all can do what you want.  I am obviously a total moron with no expertise or knowledge.  I post everything from totally out of the blue...

Wow, somebody has a sensitive ego! Since the OP didn't feel certain when the best time to pick the fruit was, there is no harm in bagging fruit when they seem close to optimal size but not ready yet, and that way you don't lose it if you guessed wrong. If you only have a few fruit, it's very easy and avoids the risk of losing the fruit entirely to pests. Getting one's ego hurt over other members posting suggestions is not a great way to be part of a forum - you're bound to get your feelings hurt daily that way. Not everyone thinks alike, and no one person is king of the forum. The great thing about growing tropical fruit, is it can be done successfully in multiple different ways, which is why is it able to be grown all over the world in so many vastly different cultures despite no internet for thousands of years for people to communicate practices. And yet, the fruit and the growers survived doing their own thing...

It's only been 4 or 5 years and already you don't know how long you've been together? It wasn't like it was that long ago...

Cashew apples are apparently very variable... there is another thread on it recently you should read through if you're leaning toward cashew.

I'm a little confused that people think pomegranates are hard to eat. ...? I just score it into quarters, and peel the skin off the quarters with my finger, and viola- 4 equal parts of seeds! All you have to do is lift the section to your mouth, and scrape the seeds off into it with your teeth - they usually all come off in one big juicy bunch, leaving just the white astringent quarter behind that held them all. It's not hard at all. It takes less work than this video does with all the fancy cutting...

Oh yeah, forgot to add TR Hovey Papaya, which is a dwarf papaya that fruits at a short height...


*Add also natal plum, which is a pretty shrub with great smelling flowers, and can fruit at pretty much whatever height you choose to keep it at. I have not eaten m own fruit yet, but I had someone else's fruit, and really liked it. Apparently, the taste is very variable.

Apparently the dwarf coconut can get huge, but my friend grows a normal coconut palm here, which hopefully will continue to do well.

My thought is if you were really excited about trying it, you could probably train it to grow sideways a bit so it wouldn't get too tall in its older age, and then cut each of the fronds in half so they wouldn't take up so much space but could still produce food. I would bet you that even a somewhat sickly coconut like that would still produce fruit, because sickly coconuts produce fruit here all the time even when they have basically nothing to live on. They grow like weeds here in a very harsh environment. If someone was just obsessed with the idea of experiencing growing their own coconut, more than likely you could get one to fruit in such conditions, even if it did not produce huge crops such as typical coconuts are capable of when very healthy. The thing that takes up all the space are the fronds, not the trunk so much. So tying them together, cutting them, or leaving one frond and chopping the rest off, would probably still result in fruit production of some sort. But of course I feel bad describing what sounds like coconut torture, so hopefully anyone who does this takes good care of their poor coconut in other ways so it's not merely a slave to production! They are really beautiful plants in their own right, even without the fruit, and they deserve a little dignity.

But if you're looking for space efficiency vs. fruit production, and did not have a special thing for coconuts, no I would definitely not say a coconut is an efficient choice in term of size versus output.


*Oh, forgot to mention sherbet berry, and everbearing mulberries if you're willing to prune. Again, not technically tropical, but warm-weather plants that can fruit small.

Condo mangoes like Pickering, if you don't mind pruning.
Peanut butter fruit
Miracle fruit
Strawberry Tree (Muntingia calabura)
Coffee
Truly Tiny banana
Pineapples
Passionfruit and any other vine fruit
Barbados cherry
Surinam cherry
Cherry of the rio grande
Pitangatuba
Mysore raspberry (but careful about placement so you don't scratch yourself walking by!)
Sugar cane if you're willing to keep cutting it
Citrus like Calamondin or Makrut lime can fruit at small sizes, but I'm not sure if you need to put them in a greenhouse considering where you live - nonetheless, someone else reading this for small fruiting plants might find the lists useful...
Pomegranates can be trained to stay within height requirements, again if you don't mind pruning. Dwarf pomegranate, except that the fruit is usually not worth it.
Sugar apple
Figs, but again, you might already be able to grow these outdoors. But for people reading from further North than you, they might appreciate these suggestions.
Gogi berry is another one that's not tropical, but can fruit at a small size.
Starfruit can fruit below 8ft and be kept short.
Likewise with Sapodilla
Same with lychee, you can just keep pruning it
Dwarf coconut
Most tropical vegetables - plenty of good ones very worthy of growing
Almost anything you could want to grow in the tropics could be subject to espalier, and then you can keep them at whatever height you want because they simply start to grow sideways rather than up. I don't know that anyone has ever tried to keep bananas at a particular height, but you could be the first to experiment if you want - if you get a dwarf variety like Namwah, and keep cutting off the leaves or letting them bend at 7ish-ft, will it still eventually put out the flower stalk? Maybe so... Or if you train it to bend a bit sideways with support... You can't really train it to espalier technique of course, but maybe it would fruit even if it had to start bending sideways... I don't know.

The limit with growing plants is only your imagination, and your budget. If you're willing to lose plants, take the risk and try to grow whatever you really want to grow, and just keep training the limbs, or pruning the top, or whatever you have to do to keep it the size you want, and just see what happens. You seem pretty patient about whether or how soon these things fruit, anyway.

Honestly, while I listed some things that are not truly tropical, most tropical plants can fruit at a height below 8ft. The plant will be under some stress, and might not produce an ideal crop, but that would be true for any plant in a greenhouse anyway. You just keep bending the limbs, or pruning the plant, so it never hits the ceiling. The only ones you can't would be like a standard coconut palm for instance, and even those, you can train to grow sideways from the beginning (as they often do in the wild) and so still could fruit at under 8ft - although the space they would take up inside a greenhouse would be enormous, especially after the first few years of growth, simply because the fronds are huge. 

There are a ton of naysayers on this forum. Just do what you want. There are a lot of dwarf plants in the tropical world, and you can stick to those, but you could also branch out (so to speak) and try things that are not typically dwarf but that can technically fruit at a low height even though you might have to keep bending or cutting it back (the remains of which you can use for fertilizer and mulch). Then again, a lot of good options are not necessarily tropical, if you simply want to produce good food year round - like strawberries, melons, blueberries, raspberries, tomatoes, peppers, squash... Short fruiting plants are in no small supply, whether tropical or temperate. The only limit is with what you're willing to try.

Thanks for this! Loved it. If anyone else has recommendations or links for other videos on tropical fruits/vegetables/medicines like this, please post! So much biodiversity out there, so many flavors and medicines, and we will barely scrape the surface in each of our lifetimes...

Clarification: Yes, cocktail trees are cheating, lol. But points for attempting to find a loophole! No grafting extra plants outside of the 5 to the trunks/branches/vines to get around the 5-plant-only total.

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I'm still having trouble answering my own question, so I hope to continue to see more answers to give me input!

Some of the plants I'm considering at the moment include: Pitangatuba, Okari nut (Terminalia kaernbachii), Pitomba, Salak, Tampoi, African Apricot, Baobab, Burahol, Cambuca, Aglaia edulis...

If I was guaranteed to see fruit in my lifetime, Baobab might make the list for instance because I could eat the leaves in the meantime, and fruiting it even once on US soil to taste it would be quite an accomplishment and really exciting. I guess by that same logic, mangosteen should be considered - but then again, if by the nature of this fantasy I am guaranteed good quality fruit at some point, I suppose it's not much of an accomplishment to take any pride in that in fact my magical-wish trees produced fruit for me, even in the contiguous US.

I guess this is like having a fruit/plant genie grant you 5 plant wishes (and no wishing for more wishes!/cocktail trees). Magical plants that will grow well and produce good quality fruit.

Maybe I should consider cacao, which has more than 1 edible use, and also is fairly medicinal - having use as not only a mild stimulant, but also a diuretic, antioxidant, mood stabilizer, and properties that have been shown to be anti-HIV. That's pretty cool.

Of course, when I think about that, I start to think maybe I should concentrate all my 5 wishes on plants that are primarily medicinal - I mean, wouldn't it be a great service to humanity if I could be guaranteed to grow healthy plants that are very rare and have some of the most potent medicine and needed in the world, so that I could share their medicine with other people because the plant is guaranteed to produce so I don't have to be stingy about hording the fruit to myself?

Lol, to me this is such a philosophical question...
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In reply to some of the above comments, I would say that for me, durian and jackfruit would not make the list because my experiences so far with the taste of both are pleasant but not something I go wild over. I am currently growing jackfruit though, and plan to attempt durian perhaps next year, so maybe through those experiences some day my answer would change, because I know at least both are prolific food producers with a really interesting aesthetic. If I decide I really love the taste of a particular variety, perhaps this could be worth it to me. But as it stands now, I could take or leave either of them.

My experience tasting Rambutan has been a perpetual disappointment to me. I have only bought them in the stores/farmer's markets, so am likely not sampling any select cultivar, but I am less found of their texture than of the texture of lychee, and to m the flavor has an egg-y quality that I really do not like. Generally speaking, I do not like any fruit that reminds me of eggs, egg nog, etc. I am growing canistel but have never tasted one, and so we'll see someday if it turns out this also means I don't care for canistel or similar fruit.

Many people have high praise for pulasan, so maybe I should consider that on my list, although I have not tasted them yet.

The mention of the mulberry made me realize that even while I enjoy mulberry specifically, and berries in general, I think I am not a big enough fan of berries to likely include any on my list. Same with melons. I LOVE growing bananas, but since I am not actually a big fan of the taste of bananas, I know this would not make the cut for me either.

I don't know much about longkong and duku, maybe I should consider one of them...

Wow, that chamba sounds delicious! At the moment I don't think I like citrus strongly enough to include any on my list, nor anything that tastes strongly like citrus fruits, but I do know that I love the experience of growing lemons, and at one time a Bearss lemon would have made the list. I also would consider growing a tangerine, based purely on the fact that I love the taste, and could eat multiple tangerines every day for the rest of my life if I had the opportunity. They are also a useful plant because I assume that like other citrus, you can cook with the leaves as an herb, and also eat the flowers - something which I do all the time with my other citrus plants. I am growing 2 types of tangerines now but as of this year have only had a single flower, which was the first the plants have ever produced since they are new to my yard and still fairly small.

Ugh, this question is so hard for me because there are so many things I want to grow, choosing only 5 is torture!

Mmm... I'd like to try that! Too bad I'm not in Singapore... but I am considering living there someday, so hopefully those will still be around for me to taste when I get there!

I almost ordered one this year, because they should do very well in my location. But reading about the acid inside the shell scared me off. It sounded like too many disasters waiting to happen, even if I concentrate on growing it for the fruit around it. I don't want a neighbor's dog to get ahold of it, and if I have kids someday, that could be really dangerous.

Anybody who's had good experiences with this though, and knows of a safe and simple way to home-process the nuts, certainly feel free to allay my fears.