The Tropical Fruit Forum

Very good. I live in a forest, and if I can grow this fruit under dappled forest shade that would be fantastic. Even better if I can use existing trees as trellises/support and maximize my space as I have an undeveloped forest lot next to my improved lot. I don't see many people talking about actually eating this fruit or their plants bearing fruit yet is this very newly introduced to the west? Would be nice to get things like this and my feijoas in the ground. I'm guessing most people have seeds from tradewinds when they were available a year or so ago. I tend towards preferring the flavors of tropical fruits more than most temperate fruit trees (though melons and berries are nice). I'm also curious how well this will resist the forest critters.

There's a website selling this fruit plant with obnoxious branding and marketing. I'm sure you know the one, I won't mention them by name because I can't stand that stuff. From searching this forum I see they were on Etsy once but are no longer which is a poor sign.  Anyone know if they are actually legit or what kind of plants they are actually selling? I'd much rather buy from a complete stranger here than patronize a company that looks so skeevy so I'm more curious than anything.

Are you talking about Wildlands Farm & Nursery?

I've been a regular listener to the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast by John Kempf. He definitely favors sap analysis over foliar testing, which I understand. I personally don't have such a service available near here, so I had to do a foliar analysis instead. Either way, I don't think I'm going to be doing either test on a regular basis. I doubt many on this forum would either. It seems more geared towards commercial growers that need to keep things on point to make realtime adjustments. It's a pretty useful tool, but you probably need to have a commercial operation to justify the cost of that level of precision.

How big do they get when mature?

I really can't believe how skinny the stems are based on the size of the seeds.

I noticed a couple sprouts in one other spot today, but it looks like one of them was defoliated by grasshoppers. That's probably what happened to all the other ones. Oh well. I probably should've used some finished compost instead of the aged bedding that I covered the seeds with. The one I found yesterday seems pretty healthy though. There is also what looks like another healthy seedling that I came across while weedwacking a broadacre section of the property today, even though I don't remember sowing any there. I thought I had only planted avocado seeds in that area.

A couple years ago, I went to the local nursery and saw they had a plant in the edibles section that they were calling cereza, which is the generic spanish name for cherry. I asked for a proper scientific name, and of course no one at the nursery knew. They just reiterated "cereza".
So, I decided to get one and see for myself, now that it has fruited it turns out it's a Surinam Cherry (Eugenia uniflora), and the fruits are actually pretty decent. We decided we want to grow more, so we planted 2 seeds per spot in four different spots near the house. That was over a month ago, and I was expecting to see some seedlings by now.

The oldest ones were only sitting around the house for about a week. The freshest were planted the same day we ate the fruit. How long do they typically take to germinate? We used some wood shavings from spent animal bedding, so we have some tomatoes, pink bananas and papayas that have sprouted from the spots, but I haven't noticed anything that looks like a Surinam Cherry seedling.

Not a good fertilizer for alkaline soil.

If this is seed seller Wong, i will not buy seeds from him again. In my case it was not failed delivery but rotted seeds. I bought a pretty large amount of various species and 95% already arrived rotted and moldy. And the real reason i am not buying from him again is because he did not seem to care much about the fact that they arrived useless.


I have only dealt with Maryoto once and i liked him for his honesty. I had already paid him for a large shipment but after a few weeks he found out that he can not ship from there due to phyto restrictions so he refunded me the whole amount effortlessly.

I don't know. Sounds like the consensus is that the only decent seller is Maryoto, so just avoid anyone that isn't him, and you should be fine.

Just thought I'd give you all a heads up, as I didn't expect for this forum to lead to such a level of disrespect for a customer.

https://tropicalfruitforum.com/index.php?topic=51265.msg509590#msg509590

BUYER BEWARE!

I inquired to the OP of this thread about Musa ingens seeds. He referred me to a "friend" of his. Someone who goes by the name of Tono. Or Toño. Apparently this friend could get seeds, so I started a dialogue via whatsapp and eventually agreed to send him the payment via paypal friends and family option. Prior to sending the payment, I requested to disguise the shipment using black beads of similar size. For this service I was told I would have to pay extra. So I agreed and sent the extra amount.

Shortly thereafter, I received a message from Tono saying that the shipment had been X-rayed by customs and the shipment rejected, so it never even left Indonesia. Despite my suggestions otherwise, Tono's "agent" just went ahead and re-shipped the shipment the same exact way a second time. Of course the shipment got rejected again. Eventually, after some back and forth messaging with Tono, he included some photos of what he used to "disguise" the seeds. It turns out it was just some artisanal cup with a separate small plastic baggy containing the seeds. It looked completely sketchy, and was certainly not the mixing of black beads with the seeds that I had requested and paid for.

You can probably predict my reason for posting this: Tono acted stubborn after this and has not issued the reimbursement. It's been over a month now.

I will remove this post if I receive the funds back.

It’s rare that this happens in AU.

Seems weird to me that a country would even look at that stuff going outbound. I can understand X-rays and dogs to look for drugs and firearms, etc. but analyzing packages for seeds sounds pretty intense on the outbound side, especially if they're labelled as something else on the declaration.

In English the term "lime" is often typically reserved for Calcium Carbonate only. Dolomite is a deposit that contains calcium carbonate and magnesium carbonate. We're lucky we have a good deposit of dolomite in our local area. I'd like to see those machines you speak of. Although I think we will have better results in the future doing Total Grazing with Cows and hair sheep. No sense to keep using machinery as the ongoing cost is high. We also need to be mindful of species selection. It would likely be an uphill battle growing avocados for example, whereas we could just plant something like cashew and enjoy high-productivity without any inputs.

I've read multiple sources that say well-managed tropical pastures (and silvopastures) sequester more carbon than native forest. A healthy improved pasture, with forage legumes and maintained with non-selective rotational grazing is probably the most effective approach to soil building. I would also argue that in the equatorial tropics, trees should be included in any pasture. There have now been studies showing that humus formation is several times more attributed to root exudates than from litter contributions to the O horizon. So it's actually better to not keep the grass constantly mowed, because the grass plants contribute more exudates once they have acheived full size and produced seed. When it comes to the growth of trees though, there is a valid debate though based on the argument of allelopathy. Most professional tree plantations, for instance, incorporate forage legumes as groundcover.

Gypsum is a zero on the calcium carbonate equivalence scale. Not a negative and not a positive. So neither acidity promoting nor alkalinizing.

Most of my thoughts about your points are based on the book, Properties and Management of Soils in the Tropics. The author of that book summarizes the benefits of gypsum as it relates to subsoil acidity, which sounds like it's a topic commonly confused. Here's what he says:
 

• Unlike lime, gypsum does not neutralize exchangeable Al3+
or increase pH.
• Gypsum reduces aluminum saturation, by adding
exchangeable Ca2+ to the ECEC.
• Gypsum eliminates calcium deficiency in the subsoil,
which is probably more important than subsoil aluminum toxicity in many Oxisols and Ultisols. Calcium must
be present in the soil around the root tips since it is not
translocated from the plant tops, as mentioned before.
• Gypsum increases the uptake of soil moisture from the
subsoil, preventing drought stress during dry spells in the
rainy season (veranicos in Brazil).
• The sulfate anions in gypsum form non-toxic insoluble
aluminum complexes, decreasing aluminum in the soil
solution and aluminum saturation in the subsoil as well.
• Nitrate ions not taken up by plants can rapidly leach
to the subsoil where they are captured by the anion
exchange capacity present in oxidic subsoils (see Chapter . Deep roots can capture this nitrate.
• Gypsum applications can decrease exchangeable Mg2+ in
the topsoil and move it downwards, necessitating dolomitic
lime on MgSO4 applications if the topsoil levels are low.
• Decreases in exchangeable K+ have happened occasionally
in fruit crops, but seldom in cereal crops, because crops
recycle leached potassium with their deep roots, promoted by gypsum, and add it to the soil surface as stover.
• Gypsum increases the sulfur content of forage, or cereal
stover that is used as forage, to the required level of 4 g S/kg
of dry mass (Chapter 15).
• The residual effects of gypsum surface applications can
last for at least 5 years in the subsoil.
• Crop yields often double, and the effects of more frequent
dry spells and rainfall variability, often attributed to climate change, are attenuated.
A summary of the effects is illustrated in Fig. 9.16. With no
gypsum, most of the roots were concentrated in the dry
topsoil. With the rate of 6 t/ha of gypsum, root distribution
with depth was more uniform, reaching 75 cm. Without
gypsum, nitrate “bulged” in the subsoil, no doubt due to
the anion exchange capacity of these subsoils. With gypsum,
the bulge disappeared because nitrate was taken up by the
maize roots. The best results occur when gypsum is applied
together with lime, preferably dolomitic.
Gypsum is now recommended for Oxisols, oxidic Ultisols
and acid, sandy Entisols and Inceptisols, which cover...

Round these parts we call those "dog treats" when ripe.

Not sure about the soils there. Ours are aluminum heavy but less than yours it seems. Gypsum goes a long way!

I think the deal is the holy grail of no inputs and regeneration of forest. The devil is in the details though. People will say there's no witches broom fungus in syntropic farms and no infestations. This is not true. The one famous case of a commercial syntropic farm I know of with decades of experience is billed as being zero input and the like, but actually they use manure and the like like everyone else, as well as large teams of labor from people who pay to take classes. It does show that you can restore soil by accelerating regeneration and labor alone which is a feat. In terms of commercial farming though labor and selling those products is a massive question.

They cite some studies but I've never found them. In Brazil there's lots of research on SAFs (agroforestry systems) particularly for coffee, cacao, and açaí if you read Portuguese.

Ernest is very into old school life in terms of doing everything manually, oral history etc. He never wrote anything. The followers skew to the philosophical side so that compounds it. It's all very new. We're talking since the 90s only and Ernest cultivates just 5ha these days and never seems to have tried to sustain a commercial operation. A sober view would be that it's just a pocket of the broader agroforestry world which is getting worked out.

Stuff with more years behind it would be the communities in Tome-acu in the amazon which developed cooperatives and systems of agroforestry around acai, cacao, pupunha, cupuaucu, etc. There's others as well of course

You've got some very interesting insights about all that. All those claims sound a lot like permaculture. Permaculture is what inspired me. The founder of permaculture, on the other hand, documented his knowledge a lot better than Ernst. Mostly though permaculture has been co-opted by hippies with a lot of exaggerated claims, and it doesn't seem like there are many commercially successful examples there either. It feels a little cultish, and I also get a sense of that from the youtubers I've seen who are into syntropic agroforestry.

"It does show that you can restore soil by accelerating regeneration and labor alone which is a feat."
That's what interested me in learning more about it. I live in an area where it's not feasible to add a lot of product and mechanizing is probably impossible.  I wonder how long it would take to reduce subsoil Al3+ saturation of 80% to a more reasonable level like 40% without the addition of any liming agents. That Al saturation measurement at our place was taken two years after adding 1 ton per hectare of dolomite and weedwacking the area probably a total of 5 times (i.e. cycling the biomass 5 times). If we were able to till in another ton per hectare of dolomite to the subsoil, then it would probably get the levels pretty close to 40%. We are thinking of adding another ton to the top soon, but we have no way of tilling it in, and we probably shouldn't, because it would disturb the trees' roots. My understanding is that it will percolate to the subsoil over time and begin to correct that situation.

There is a liming effect of adding mulches, but it's not well-researched. I assume the weedwacking and leaf fall in our case is at least somewhat equivalent to the addition of mulches to the denuded croplands that were used in studies. I understand the disease-suppressive and nutrient-cycling/mining potential of soil biology as well, so that is why I am a believer in syntropic agroforesty. Just wish there were better resources to explain the justification for all the peculiar things that they do.

For the uninitiated, here's probably the most watched video on the topic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE