I live in Longwood, Florida, and two of my neighbors have mango trees in the ground and I've seen another 4 or 5 trees in the Longwood / Lake Mary area when I've been running around here.

One neighbor has a NDM and one has a home depot special.  The neighbors here don't really speak much English (we live on a "worldly" block with about 8 or 9 languages spoken on the street), so it's hard to verify with them the actual name.

Anyway, the NDM produced 6 fruits this year and has been in the ground for a while (I think about 3 years) and has put on some good height and branching.  The home depot special tree is about 3 feet tall now and just as wide, as the neighbor shaping the plant in the Japanese way  to keep it low but very, very wide.

The home depot special neighbor put a blanket over the tree about 5 times this last winter but nothing else and the tree looks incredibly healthy.  I'm not sure what the NDM guy did to protect the plant if he even did anything.  We had 1 night around 30 and a few nights right at the 32 degree mark this year.

On my end, I put down 10 seedlings in the beginning of June that I had been growing in pots.  2 of those seedlings were about a year old and the other 8 were around 3 to 6 months old.  I ended up loosing 3 seedlings due to transplant shock as they really weren't ready to transplant yet from the pots they were in (I think these were the 3 month old seedlings).  The 2 older seedlings are from Keitt parents and have very, very long internodes.  They're tall but show no branching and no real structure.  All of the smaller seedlings are from grocery store mango's so I have no idea of the parentage.  2 of them have a ton of leaves with very, very small internodes and the others look 'normal' for the lack of a better word.

On a bright note, I have 2 mango tree growing in my compost pile.  I opened the husks and took the seeds out before I composed some pits and other vegetable matter and to say they have taken off is an understatement.  I thought that they needed a lower nutrient environment but man they've flushed twice now and grown more than the 6 month old seedlings I transplanted into the regular ground.  I need to dig those out and move them to a better area.

In the future for any mango trees I'm planning on planting, I'm thinking I should dig a decent size pit and use that area for compost for a month or two, then put the tree on top of the compost pile.  I really can't believe the boost those 2 seedlings have.

I also started a bunch of papaya trees from seed in the beginning of May.  They're up to about 3 inches, maybe 4 inches tall now and growing well.  They were pretty stunted (and I have them in good soil), but I started using Miracle Grow on them and they've doubled in size over the last week and have around 15 dwarf cavandish banana trees growing.  I bought 1 tree from home depot that I grew in a pot for a while, split into three trees now I've got 15 trees growing.  Haven't harvested any bananas yet as I was more trying to get multiple plants growing than getting fruit.  Now that I'm up to 15 trees I'll work on growing them bigger and not separating them out.

As for containers, I have 7 mango trees growing in pots now.  I have a 25 gallon, two 7 gallon, two 3 gallon and two 1 gallon trees.  All but the 25 gallon trees are also seedlings.  One of the 7 gallon trees has flushed 3 times since May and doubled in size, but that growth started after we got all those rain days.  Rainwater has been significantly better for my trees than Longwood City water has been.

I tried growing a mamey sapote but something got at the seed after it through its first few leaves and destroyed the seed.  I also have 5 loquat trees growing from seed and a Florida Prince peach tree in pots that I got for free from Duke Energy.

I'm only renting the house I'm at now, so I don't really want to put too much in the ground.  I much prefer to keep trees in the ground, especially for watering purposes, but don't want to put too much work into the yard if we end up leaving.  I'm buying a house when my lease is up in 2 more years - the only questions is will it be this one or somewhere else.  I don't mind leaving the mango trees as they cost me just a few pennies to grow on my own.

My citrus trees have not done well.  One has been attacked by red ants constantly and no matter what I do I can't get rid of them.  I'm pretty sure its aphids on the tree but I'm ready to give up on that tree and just rip it out.  I've spent way too much money on that tree with sprays and the like and its just useless.  The other 4 citrus trees I put in the ground haven't done much.

Hi Samu, did you pollinate the cherimoya or did it self polinate?  My baby trees already have little fruit on them like yours but I never polinated them?

I have found tipping and sometimes pruning to do the trick. several grafts that pushed little and then stayed there with anemic growth after pruning woke up hard. its a great tool we all have and should exercise.