Hi Caesar,

Nice thread and subject. Here is an excellent high definition and high-quality video on the subject that should answer all your questions:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_i2_soyLDSQ&index=3&list=PL60FnyEY-eJAMOPvU-yyF4JfuW5ocJvC4

It is on apples, but you should be able to make a good estimate or guess on how it works for Rubus. I don't know much about that genus, but because most of these things are so general for most plants, I would guess that:

1) yes, you should emasculate the flowers you want to pollinate (the females) by opening them the day before they open and snipping of the anthers before they ripen (with a small pair of clippers or scissors) - I wouldn't risk waiting until they open.
2) Harvest the pollen sacks from the plant you want to be the father (the males) in a little container and let them ripen and dry at room temperature for a day or two - then you can pollinate the emasculated female flowers with a little brush (or your finger)
3) It could be wise to put a little bag over the flowers, or the entire branch with flowers you cross pollinated. Isolate them until all other flowers are gone.


But again, all details and much more info is in the video. Get that breeding freak on! 

Good luck!

Very cool project, Adam!
And great that you are going to use the precocious seedlng. Simon has good advice for the pollination techniques. Be careful with colchicine though, if you would chose to use it - it is a hormone that tempers with cell division. Always wear gloves and protect yourself.

If the little one flowers most of the time, I think you will quickly figure out how best to pollinate.
I'll be following this thread with enthusiasm!

Fantastic!
Thank you for the seeds, Miguel 

Nice post! I live in a 8b climate here, and mine always start to flower after I bring them in around first frost in december. Unfortunately so far, every year they succomb to spider mites or another pest that attacks them a month after I bring them in. Outside they have no problems with it, but I guess the warm and dry air in the house makes the pests flourish. As a consequence they drop all their new growth and flowers and fruit. I get a second flowering in spring, after I take them back outside and have them get used to sunlight again in the way you described. Those flowers usually do produce fruits.
I have lime, lemon, and Calamondin.

Happy new year to all! And a very fruitful 2016

Hi Miguel,

This looks like another interesting one. As Barath said, it looks like a guava, but the leaves and the way it ripens reminds me of Feijoa. This will be an interesting one to grow, and it is great that it survives in a 9a climate.
If you have a couple of seeds left, I would be interested.
Have a good 2016!

Solko

Hi Nelio,

Thank you for your tips. I have often wondered what to do with the big Eucalyptus. There seems to be a lot of controversy about them in Portugal and everyone has an opinion about them. I will cut them, but I am doing it in phases. Here is how I went about it. I thought I could use their cover as protection from sun and frost for the first three years, while I planted seedling avocadoes, pawpaws and other subtropical fruit seedlings in between them. I have understood that they have a germination inhibitor, but do not actually affect seedlings after germination, except for competition for light and water as you say.
I have lost a lot of these seedlings in the last years, but I am not sure wether it is because of the trees, or because I am zone pushing too much. The Pawpaws are fine, Feijoa's also have no problem, nor the avocados. But now that they are bigger, I plan to cut most of the Eucalyptus down next year, and give the fruit trees full sunlight. My big worry was the forest fires that regulrly occur there, so i had already thinned out the Euc's, and cleaned upo the brambles and gathered all the leaves and bark of the Euc's into big mulch-piles.
Next year I plan to go for a longer time and post pictures.

Cheers,

Solko

Awesome, Huertas, thank you for uploading the pictures. I'll be looking forward to the taste reports.

That is a beautiful, smoothly healed graft, Sapote.

i am curious, too. Did you do a v-shaped graft in which you shaped the rootstock as a V, and the scion as a complimentary shaped wedge. Something like an inverted saddle-graft? Or was this a normal cleft graft - just a simple perpendicular cut through the rootstock with a wedged scion inserted? In the latter case, I always get two 'lobes' that look like small wounds, which were the top end of the split rootstock. At least the first year. They heal over quite quickly.

Hola huertasurbanas,

Three years ago I planted 6 or 7 macadamia seedlings of about one and a half years old in the north of Portgal - zone 9a. They were about the same size as yours and i grew them from seed myself indoors. I planted them under Eucalyptus and some other brushes - not in full sun and they have all survived three winters up to now and are growing slowly but steadily. They definitely handled some frost, although not much, but they survived where cherimoya, jaboticaba, strawberry guava seedlings, white sapote seedlings and others were struggling and dying. That may also be because of their exceptional drought tolerance in summer, but i was pretty surprised by their hardiness. So if you can give them some overhead protection, i think it could be worth while to try to plant one of them outside. They love acid soil. And the sooner they can get their roots deep in the ground, the healthier tree you will get.

 Good luck, and I can try to look for seeds here if you like

Hey guys, you are coming down pretty hard on a guy that is trying to do something new.  I admire him for that, because it's hard. Really really hard. It takes a long time to breed something. You'll have to invest a lot of your time, efforts, patience and  you will have to assume a lot of setbacks, dissapointment, manage land, plants, climate, selection, everything.

If you want only big multinational companies to be able to do that, backed with plenty of capital, land and time, than go on butchering this guy. But he at least is doing it.

He's trying to create something new and that is pretty hard. When is the last time you had the spirit to do that?
If you don't want anything new, but just insist on being treated like a first class, spoiled and self-important customer who demands great service and business, with a little pet on the back for planting a tree, that is fine by me.
There's plenty of mango's out there and just grow those. If you pick so much on anyone who tries to improve fruit that we all love, you urge that person to become just like yourself: a picky customer who rather bitches about someone else than invest in trying to improve something for the benefit of all of us.

This forum is full of people who start whining right away when they don't get their rare seeds sent to them or when people try new crosses and the variety is not up to commercial standards.

Don't get me wrong, I'd like to know if someone is a cheat, But do you really think this guy a cheat, or is he just really trying, but overwhelmed by the logistics of doing everything himself? Like many of the people who send us seeds from Brasil or Indonesia, I for one am thankful people like him are willing to do that and I admire how they keep on doing that despite the complaints and pityful whining of people who expected first class all american service.

If you can do it better, do it yourself.


That said, keep on growing!

Hi Delvi,

I agree with Jackedfruit here. Cold tolerance is the first thing you focus on when trying out new plants, and it is very important to know, but it is only one factor in growing a plant. I have started growing exotics about six to seven years ago, and in the mean time I have moved back and forth through three different countries and climates in Europe. I was in the Netherlands (the north), Portugal (the south) and France (the alps) And this is my experience with cold tolerance:

I think of cold tolerance only as one side of a coin. The flip side is wether the plant is able to thrive in summer, in such a way that it has built up enough reserves to take the cold in winter. Whether a plant can live in a place is a bit like asking yourself wether you can work in one of these countries. In Portugal manual labor makes only 450 euro's a month. In the Netherlands it is about 1450, almost three times as much. But it also requires more diploma's, more taxes, more insurance and more permits, before you can legally start to do it. And then the cost of housing and food is almost three times as much as in Portugal as well. So in the end., the only thing that matters, is what is left at the end of the month. Other specialist jobs have other salaries compared to the cost of living in each country and it is the proportion of salary vs living expenses, much more than the salary itself that make certain countries more interesting than others.

For plants it seems to be the same thing. Besides from cold tolerance (which I consider an 'expense' for the plant), you need to ask yourself what the plant needs as inputs to thrive first. That is when it accumulates reserves, or 'makes money'. If you can get a plant to thrive in your climate in summer, only then is it worth it to look at the cold tolerance in winter - in my opinion.

If the cost to make it thrive is too high, because you need to irrigate, fertilize, spray, or add heat to keep the plant alive, then - even when it is cold tolerant in winter to your temperatures, it will not have built up the reserves to live more than a couple of years. You will basically have to 'subsidize' the plant with inputs just to keep it alive, but you will see it slowly decay.


So, to me a more interesting question would be, what species can one make thrive in your area, and what things are easy to accomodate, like irrigation, windbreaks, etc.. Then you make sure you have healthy plants and cold tolerance will probably turn out to be the least of your limiting factors.

But to answer your question, in the north of Portugal, which is closer to the Atlantic then where you are, but around the same southern latitude:
(it gets frost some years, but only to -2 or -3 and never for too long.)
I have had luck with:

Citrus,
seedling avocado,
Feijoa
Strawberry Guava
Macadamia



And I've seen with neighbours:

Musa sp
Tamarillo of several years old
Cherimoya
Passiflora spp
Carissa



But things that all died for me over and over again (from seedlings)

Longan,
Lychee
Guava
White Sapote
Black Sapote
Carambola
Coffea
Eugenia Brasiliensis
Dragon Fruit


Hope that helps, good luck,

Solko

Thank you for sharing these pictures. That tree seems loaded with fruit. I am growing this one, but I have just two seedlings. Do you like the taste?