I know it's off season right now here in the Northern Hemisphere, but does anyone here have Grumichama seed for sale (maybe in the Southern Hemisphere)?

Great -- I'll add some micronutrients (probably as kelp / fish emulsion) and see how it goes.  I've added sulfur and cottonseed meal in the past to lower pH so I think it should be acidic enough now.  Thanks!

I've been puzzled by a strange coloration on my citrus and sapodilla leaves -- leaf margins/edges and veins (and only the margins and veins) are yellow, and the rest of leaf is deep green.  The leaves definitely don't look like what I've seen on healthy citrus and sapodilla, but I'm not sure what might be causing this.  Both are in containers and are fed periodically with generic organic fertilizers of various types.  Has anyone seen this sort of problem?

Thanks -- I'll check back during the season then.

Where did you get your seeds from?

Thanks for the info.  I'm happy to hear about reports of success even in Southern California, since that give me more data on what microclimates work and don't work.  I'm not exclusively curious about Northern California -- even hearing about anyone growing Sapodilla around Santa Barbara would be great, because that'd mean that good microclimates in Northern California could do it too.

Aren't there a bunch of Hawaiian cultivars that are known to be rich and creamy?  I compiled a list of the Hawaiian ones I heard were good:  Kahaluu, Malama, Yamagata, Fujikawa, Green Gold, Ota. 

There's always Kona Sharwil, though some things I've read suggest it actually tastes better when grown in California rather than Hawaii.

Does anyone have experience with cultivars such as "Lolita" and "Chamba", among others?  (Those two seem to be propagated by some nurseries here in California.)  I've read that they're both good with minimal resinous flavor, but I've never tried them.

Sorry for yet another reply -- P. ligularis and P. laurifolia are worth trying in LA.  I'm growing ligularis outdoors here, and while it likes growing in nearly full shade, it's just not hot enough to get it to flower.

P. laurifolia -- Jamaican passionfruit -- is probably my favorite fruit, but it's considered tropical so I'm growing it indoors, and have two sprawling indoor vines in my office.  However, if you're in a warmer spot in So Cal -- a warm zone 10b -- then you can probably grow it outdoors.  I spoke with a farmer who grows it outdoors commercially in Homestead, FL, and while that doesn't necessarily mean much for growing something in LA, I've learned that P. laurifolia likes slightly drier climates anyway.

For juices & deserts, you can't go wrong with one of the hybrids developed for SoCal, such as Frederick.  Very vigorous and prolific in this area.  And easy to find.  I'm not a fan of eating it "out of hand" though.

I've tried growing a couple of the yellow tropicals (the sweet "lilikoi" and a flavicarpa that produced very large fruits) - neither have done much for me in my yard.  Still holding out hope, but no flowers and not much growth after almost 2 years...

Frederick, on the other hand, spread across approx 25' of 5' tall chain link fence in a single growing season - with dozens of fruits - the first year it was planted; my older Frederick vine produces several hundred fruit annually.

I'm pretty surprised that lilikoi isn't fruiting for you in San Diego -- I'm growing it in Northern California and while it's not producing heavily, it's producing, and it flowers like crazy.  Frederick and Black Knight do produce much more.

I'm really hoping we can somehow get seeds / cuttings of the varieties Mike from Australia talks about -- African Gold, Panama Purple, and Panama Gold.  I think they'd do well in hotter parts of California.  Maybe we could put in together so it's worth Mike's while to send us some as a group?

I should add that the one exception to this is temperate nut trees, in that they have relatively high fat content, at least concentrated in one place.  Many of these (e.g. almonds, walnuts) are actually stone fruits and the nuts are the seed.  But the total yield of fats / calories (in terms of energy) per year is pretty low, I think, compared to tropical trees that are high sugar or high fat.

I got really excited about the idea of an Avocado relative that tastes like the cross between and Avocado and a Coconut, so I did a lot of digging into this earlier this year.  There's a guy named Jay Bost at University of Hawaii who went to the native region and visited many small towns asking about it, and wrote a couple of research papers on it.  He also got folks from towns in the region to bring their best fruit for a tasting event.  The thing is, I don't know if anything happened with the seeds from that fruit -- whether they planted seeds from the best fruit or not.

I also asked about the history of the specimens that were in the University of California collection.  There was a small grove of them planted at UCLA in the early 1900s but it seems that they were lost or cut down when UCLA stopped being the main site for the agriculture collections.  I emailed the CRFG list and got (indirectly) a reply from Julie Frink at the UC field station in Irvine, and she said:

"We have an avocado that it called G755C and is an avocado X Schiedeana that was going to be tried as a root rot resistant rootstock.  The tree gets huge, does flower, but hasn't had any fruit, at least in the last 22 years."

I think it'd be exciting to find and propagate two types of schiedeana -- one line that's more of the onion-y flavor and one line that's more of the coconut-y flavor.

Here's some info I found on rooting cuttings:

http://homeguides.sfgate.com/planting-growing-pineapple-guava-tree-cuttings-46108.html

http://www.cloudforest.com/cafe/orchard-introductions/hello-from-walnut-creek-pinapple-guava-t2519.html

Sounds like cuttings from the bottom of the plant, taken at this time of year, is ideal.

I've had success with it once, by accident, but haven't tried all that much.  I have grown them from seed and found that pretty easy, but I know they're not known to be perfectly true.  I know that Merritt College Horticulture propagates their pineapple guava via cuttings, and apparently they have a good greenhouse setup to do it.