I like this forum quite a bit, but I will admit that it is not the first forum I check each day.  Still WAY better than GW. 

Personally, I would caution the moderators against adding a bunch of new sections "by fruit."  I've seen good forums ruined by slicing them up too thin.  In these cases members don't check every section, only their favorites.  I'm convinced that this reduces overall traffic and thread visibility.

That said, murahilin and PJ (and anyone else I forgot), great job!

In anticipation of the 2013 crop, I tried the hard prune in mid-July technique recommended by Lychees Online.  I turned down the GH temps at night to 52F and will hold that nighttime temp through mid-December.

I have not had a crop to speak of in about 3 years...we'll see!

It may be both the temperature swings and the absolute temps which create trouble.

My outdoor 20x23 GH hits 107F in the summer (despite max efforts at cooling with mist/shade cloth,ventilation, etc).  The plants are acclimated I guess and there is no apparent adverse effect that I have seen.

The smaller the GH the more difficult temp regulation is.  If it were me I might sacrifice some humidity to even out the temps.  The greater the difference between day and night temps, the greater your internodal length will be..."leggy" plants can be the result.

I have seen the same thing.  I hope it recovers.  I got a Kwai Muk this year as well.  Hopefully we can compare notes!

Tres cool. 

TNAndy,

I'm not far from you and zone-wise we are pretty close.  I overwinter plants in the greenhouse.

The better plants in my opinion are:
Citrus (all work well; I have Persian lime, Satsuma, Valencia, Calamondin, Wash Navel)
Carambola (I have 'Kari')
Acerola
June Plum
TR Hovey
Various figs (I have IT Honey, Chicago Hardy, Panachee, couple others)
Sugar apple
Various Psidium (I have strawberry guava, also have grown lemon, 'Nana')
Various Hylocereus
Dwarf pom (mine currently holds ~20 ripening fruit; supposedly doesn't taste as good as regular kind)

Interesting, but will not as productive:
Pitanga
Jaboticaba
Pitomba
Grumichama
Cherimoya
Feijoa

So, which part of the season for langsat in PR right now? Start or middle or end season?

PR has just moved up a few positions on my Must-Go travel list. 

We were roughly in the middle of langsat season in PR I would say.

This is bad news for me because until I saw this, I had no reason to have to find room in my GH for a jackfruit.

Tres cool, Jay.

Quote from: ohiojay on July 25, 2012, 06:54:14 AM

You mentioned in an earlier message that this will create a dry wine.  How do you make a more sweet wine?  I don't like the dry's.  Nice pics.  Will definitely keep this in mind!

As I stated in a post a while back (not sure if it was on here of teh other forum) making it in the style if ice wine will give you the most natural sweetness to the wine.  Fruit must be completely ripe (no green) and since you can't leave it on the tree to freeze naturally, you actually freeze the fruit to separate/extract the nectar from the water.

This is true.  I think it is generally accepted that fruit wines are best if the fruit has been frozen.  Both batches were made with frozen fruit; the second batch was frozen, thawed, and refrozen again a second time.

That's not accurate.

1) What's being discussed isn't just Parkinson's in general, but a very specific atypical form of Parkinson's which is rare outside areas where annonas are consumed.  It's this form that is linked to annonacin.
2) There has not been just one study; there've been a number, and they all track different lines of evidence.  There's now a direct chemical basis for why the chemical should induce aptosis in dopamine-producing brain cells (the same method it does in certain cancer cells), direct laboratory evidence of applying annonacin to cultures of such cells causes them to die, direct evidence in lab animals that the sort of blood levels of annonacin found if you consume one soursop a day (known from the earlier anti-cancer studies) causes the disease, and statistical human population studies that correlate the disease to annona consumption levels, to an astonishing degere (while only 60% of islanders conumed the fruit and 43% the tea, 97% of those with the condition consumed the fruit and 83% the tea).  What more do you need?
3) Annonacin is not just in the tea in dangerous levels, and it's not just in guanabana. 

These "downer" results weren't reached on purpose by people looking to damn annonas, by the way.  The earlier research on annonacin was its potential use as an anti-cancer drug.  The neurotoxicity was discovered as a side effect, and hence more research was called for.  Basically, it works "too well".  It doesn't only cause cancerous cells to die, but also some types of cells that you really *don't* want to die.

And again, I'll reiterate, I still eat annonas (even though Parkinsons' runs in my family!) - just in moderation.  It's the dose that makes the poison**.  And I'm not going to pretend that something I enjoy doesn't carry risks simply because I enjoy it.  And my hope is that some day people will find ways to effectively breed it out of our favorite varieties or at least get the level down to irrelevant quantities.  I know at the very least this is already being done with pawpaw, and there are low-annonacin cultivars out there like "sunflower".


** - Now, some poisons are such that any amount consumed is damage that doesn't go away, and if you accumulate enough, you have big irreversible problems.  Annonacin doesn't seem to be this way.  The lab studies show that neuron cells stop dying and can recover whenever there's not annonacin in the body for a length of time, and the population studies show that young people with the atypical parkinsons whos top consuming the fruit can have their symptoms decline or go away completely.

I LOVE a well referenced post.

Thanks Mike.  I won't give up, I'm a persistent little bugger.

Jay, I'm still learning but I'll tell you what I know.  The sweetness is determined by the amount of sugar in the wine after fermentation is done.  That amount of sugar can be controlled or affected in 3 ways. 

1. Load up with extra sugar to start with, then the yeast ferments the sugar until the alcohol level is toxic to the yeast and kills it.  This one is a bit of a crap shoot because some yeast won't tolerate over 12% ABV but others will keep going to 18% ABV.  The yeast that tolerates more alcohol will then give you a drier wine.
2. Start with extra sugar, then watch the fermentation proceed until the sugar drops to exactly where you want it based on the specific gravity, then kill the yeast to stabilize the wine.
3. Ferment it dry, meaning ferment all the sugar, then kill the yeast to stabilize the wine, then add sugar back to the desired sweetness.

#3 is done most often because it is the most controlled method from what I know.  You can precisely control the ABV by controlling how much sugar you start with; you can ust sit and watch it ferment to dry; and you can precisely control the sweetness by adjusting the amount of sugar you add back.

I recently starting making wines, and Jay asked about pics and recipes.  I make wine solely from fruits that I grow.  So far, only tropicals, but on the temperate side I intend to try highbush cranberry, which is supposed to make an awesome wine.  I also have an enormous persimmon tree which is totally loaded this year.  So I expect 5-10 gal of persimmon wine as well.  Other tropicals may include pom, hibiscus, sugar apple, banana, others.

My first batch was guava.  The recipe is here: http://www.malaysiafruit.com/guava/wine.php but the link doesn't seem to be working now.  I used 4# frozen guava, a mix of 25% 'Nana' 35% lemon, 40% strawberry.  The recipe called for boiling the fruit, which I have subsequently learned to be a cause of pectin haze.  I think that is why this wine is so slow to clear.  Likely it will require fining.  The starting SG was 1.090 and it went to 0.994.  Topping off brought it back to 0.996.  Fantastic aroma, raw but decent taste, hopefully it will mature a little bit.  The color is off-putting, probably due to some oxidation of the fruit prior to making the wine; I hope it clears to a nice amber color but we'll see.