The Tropical Fruit Forum

the furthest north i've seen cacao being grown successfully without any protection is vero beach. 

the category feature is very useful.  i just ordered all the seeds in the dry climate category for my public food forest. 

agroventuresperu's question is profound.  i also have a profound question... what's with the peacocks? 

Adam grafted some a few weeks ago, might be worth a shot to message him and see if he will sell you one. He normally sells them on ebay for auction though.  You aren't too far from his place.

there's 3 for sale in his shop

inspired by @simon_grow's thread on california super mango rootstock, last year i combined a couple seedlings... ataulfo and palmer.  yesterday i planted the conjoined seedlings in my fledgling public food forest. 

please comment your predicted outcome...



outcome #1 - no loss



outcome #2 - loss of ataulfo branch



outcome #3 - loss of palmer branch



outcome #4 - loss of ataulfo rootstock



outcome #5 - loss of palmer rootstock



outcome #6 - loss of ataulfo entirely



outcome #7 - loss of ataulfo branch and palmer rootstock



outcome #8 - loss of palmer entirely



outcome #9 - loss of palmer branch and ataulfo rootstock



outcome #10 - total loss


since total loss is entirely possible, i hedged my bets...



in the bucket...

1. aeonium - seedling culls
2. banana - 1 namwa pup from @kevinthegarden
3. dragon fruit - 1 yellow cutting
4. elaeagnus latifolia - 3 cuttings
5. elaeagnus pungens - 1 cutting
6. epiphyllum - 1 seedling from large fruited mother
7. fig - 1 panache seedling
8. inga sp - 1 seedling
9. jackfruit - 2 sad seedlings
10. mango - 2 conjoined seedlings, ataulfo and palmer 
11. moringa - 1 seedling
12. pereskia aculeata - 1 cutting
13. pereskia grandifolia - 1 cutting
14. pereskia grandifolia ssp. violacea - 1 cutting
15. pitanga - 1 seedling

after a short walk to the fledging food forest, i crawled on my hands and knees for like 10 minutes dragging the bucket and a shovel until i found a decent spot to dig a big hole...



i dug down in the hard wet clay nearly 2', scooping the mud out with my hands, until i started seeing water.  unfortunately i had to chop some roots in the process.  then i strategically placed all the plants in the hole...



anyone care to predict the outcome?  fortunately there's no spodic layer to worry about.  but around 50 feet away there's a drainage ditch that always has at least a trickle of water runoff from the adjacent community's landscaping irrigation.  it's enough water to support more than a dozen full grown willow trees, several large palm trees, one medium size chinese elm tree, and a bunch of other weeds.  it's basically a ghetto oasis.  right now i don't have any plans to water anything that i've planted in the past couple months, but that might change. 

it's reasonable to think that all the plants in the hole will compete with each other.  for sure there will be considerable competition, but it's important to appreciate the fact that plants can trade resources with each other, thanks to fungi.  the less distance between the plants the easier it is for them to trade.  more trade means more productivity and growth.  it's basically a market.  every permaculture "guild" is a market.  so far i've created more than a dozen markets in the food forest.  as the plants in each market grow and their roots expand, there will be more and more trading between markets.  this will result in even greater productivity and growth. 

sooner rather than later all the people in florida will be green with envy over socal's very own fruit and spice park.  well, there wouldn't be any mowing, so perhaps "park" wouldn't be the best word.  some background...

SoCal Public Park For Subtropical Fruits And Nuts? - 2022
list of fruit trees in los angeles parks - 2023

in addition to the ghetto oasis that i've been planting in, across the street are two more.  so there's plenty of room for thirstier fruiting plants, but there's way more room for less thirsty fruiting plants.  recently i ordered seeds from raindance seeds...

diospyros californica (baja chocolate persimmon/sapote)

passiflora palmeri

passiflora pentaschista (desert passionfruit)

prosopis pubescens  (screwbean mesquite)

ziziphus parryi (desert jujube)



i didn't sow all the seeds from each species in its own pot.  that would have been putting all my eggs in one basket.  instead, i hedged my bets.  here's what i put into each pot, more or less...



starting from the upper left hand corner...

1. noid nitrogen fixer
2. diospyros californica
3. ziziphus parryi
4. noid nitrogen fixer
5. cyrtocarpa edulis
6. davidsonia pruriens
7. noid nitrogen fixer
8. arrayan (psidium sartorianum)
9. passiflora phoenicea (pollinated with caerulea)
10. noid nitrogen fixer
11. noid nitrogen fixer
12. psidium myrtoides
13. noid nitrogen fixer
14. mangave
15. psidium friedrichsthalianum
16. noid nitrogen fixer
17. chipilín (crotalaria longirostrata) - nitrogen fixer
18. passiflora palmeri
19. screwbean mesquite - nitrogen fixer
20. passiflora arida

today your mission is to say "chipilín" to someone. 

ideally the food forest will have all the relatively drought tolerant fruiting plants in the world!  with the goal being to hybridize them and facilitate their distribution.  come taste the fruit, keep the seeds, take a reasonable amount of cuttings and volunteers.  define "reasonable"? 

last night i watched this documentary on dudleya poaching.  i commented...

sure, the phalaenopsis on your table wasn't poached, but its ancestors certainly were.    the figs you enjoy?  poached from the wild more than 10,000 years ago.  loquat?  kiwi?  poached from china perhaps more than 100 years ago.  the achacha you still haven't enjoyed?   poached from bolivia maybe a couple decades ago.  not to mention all the veggies that have been poached, like potatoes.   thank goodness for humanity that it's only just recently that our society has become so stupid, as a result of lowest common denominator places like youtube, that laws against poaching have been enacted and enforced with taxpayer dollars that could have been spent on things that are actually useful, like public food forests.

define "useful"?  on ourfigs it's possible to tag people and subscribe to threads.  these functions are certainly useful, to me.  but just how useful are they, to us?  one way to answer the question is via donations to this forum.  donate to this forum to credibly communicate how useful it is to be able to tag people.  donate to my food forest to credibly communicate how useful garcinias are.

can food forests and forums and countries grow in the most beneficial direction without your specific sacrificial input?  nope.  maximally beneficial growth is only possible with markets.  this is equally true for plants, people and plant people. 

in the new and completely different conditions in which the conjoined mango seedlings now find themselves, i can only guess their needs.  instead of giving them a handful of slow release fertilizer, i hedged my bets by providing them with a market.  this will give the mango the opportunity to credibly communicate its needs to the dozen or so other plants in the market.  admittedly, it's entirely possible that i'm overestimating the usefulness of markets.  incorrectly estimating the usefulness of things is very easy.  after all, we're only human.  but the alternative is for you to decide for the mango how much potassium it needs.  to do this requires assuming that you're a superhuman of sorts that is magically error free.  i'm highly skeptical of such assumptions.  with this in mind, i look forward to reading your predictions regarding the mango's outcome. 

the capulin i picked up last year, originally from la verne, flowered and set fruit.  i don't think that there are any nearby capulins.  no idea if la verne is seedling or grafted variety.  the fruit tasted... sunburned... from being potted up and repositioned.  there's a big street tree i tasted last year that was really good, but i think it was cut back this year.  the seeds from it are just starting to sprout. 

now that i'm more familiar with the tree i spot it more often, especially during winter when it looks kinda like a peach tree that still has all its leaves.  gonna make a nuisance of myself knocking on doors asking if i can taste their capulins.  i'll reciprocate by sharing surinam cherry seedlings.

if you don't get a better offer feel free to pm me to trade scions.   

boticarioa62, i planted the la verne capulin in a public food forest in sylmar that i'm starting.  pm me and i'll let you know if it fruits this year. 

oh yeah, there's also one at the conejo valley botanic garden in 1000 oaks.  never visited before but i plant to.  here are other pics of their rare fruit orchard. 

when you stake a young tree, does it take longer to stand on its own two feet than if it was unstaked?  this always kinda made sense to me, but it's not like i bothered trying to track down any studies.   

it just seems like a universal basic fact that most organisms won't go the extra mile if there's no need to. 

if you supply an abundance of nitrogen to a plant, will it go the extra mile to develop an extensive underground market of fungi it can trade with for nitrogen?

if you supply an abundance of water to a plant, will it go the extra mile to find water itself? 

if you supply an abundance of support to a plant, will it go the extra mile to support itself? 

unnecessary effort is essentially a waste of limited resources...

Darwinian selection habitually targets and eliminates waste. Nature is a miserly accountant, grudging the pennies, watching the clock, punishing the smallest extravagance. - Richard Dawkins, God Delusion

I suspect, also, that some of the cases of compensation which have been advanced, and likewise some other facts, may be merged under a more general principle, namely, that natural selection is continually trying to economise in every part of the organisation. If under changed conditions of life a structure before useful becomes less useful, any diminution, however slight, in its development, will be seized on by natural selection, for it will profit the individual not to have its nutriment wasted in building up an useless structure. - Charles Darwin, Origin of Species

in my food forest when i plant a bunch of diverse plants in one hole, i tell them "relying on me for support is useless!  you want support?  rely on each other!" 

Finca La Isla, i'm trying to strain my brain and remember if i saw any ficus carica in costa rica.  i don't think that i did?  i would have remembered? 

“I would speculate that forgetting might be the default system of the brain,” Davis said at the neuroscience meeting. “We might have a slow chronic forgetting signal in our brains that basically says, ‘Let’s erase everything,’ unless a judge … comes to intervene and says, ‘This memory is worth saving.’” - Tom Siegfried, A Leaky Memory May Be a Good Thing

according to the fig article i shared, figs have been in cultivation for 11,400 years.  can you imagine how many people have said, "these fig seeds are worth saving."  so many "judges" can't be wrong.  pm me your address and i will send you some fig seeds.  just sow them on any mossy spots on big trees and very soon you will have a monopoly on figs in costa rica.  we will get so rich. 

missed seeing the 1st flower open but here's pic of the 2nd...



for comparison, here is straight passiflora caerulea...



while it's neat seeing the result of the cross, the flower is rather underwhelming.  plus, the important bits are deformed, but it's only its 1st time blooming.  so i'll reserve judgement for the next time. 

nice one. i just planted two seeds i got from anderson tropicals. I could have afforded more but they were $20 US each and never any guarantees that packages arrive in Australia, customs takes alot of them.

can we at least hope they put them to good use? 

guessing that this doesn't work with all the species... agave roast.   seems like a lot of work though. 

while you're visiting agaveville, here are my attempts at not preaching to the choir...

tropical fruit

who should we send to bolivia?

not seeing the forest for the trees

Or, since you like sci-fi, you will be cloned out of a plant like Lyekka from Lexx.

that sounds good.  is lexx worth watching? 

i tried watching the knights of sidonia anime.  didn't really catch my interest but i did like how the humans were able to photosynthesize. 

i'm a plant nerd and a sci-fi nerd so i kinda love the idea of plant bots getting harder and harder to detect.  in fact, in 500 years time, a super advanced ai named seldon will resurrect me by using all my posts to reverse engineer my mind.  not this post of course, since it's going to be deleted. 

which fruit trees should fnf add next?? 

mammea americana - my friend from martinique says this was her favorite fruit there
ficus auriculata - i linked to the variety at fairchild that doesn't require pollination and tastes like strawberries
jelly palm - for a palm the fruit is quite good, but not sure how well it grows in florida? 
spondias tuberosa - this is tricky to grow? 
solanum muricatum - i tried this recently for the 1st time and really enjoyed it, but might not be so happy in vero beach? 
davidsonia pruriens - also tried it recently for the 1st time.  too sour but the tree is beautiful. 
psidium friedrichsthalianum - another recent 1st time taste.  sour but also sweet, enjoyable. 
garcinia russell's sweet - does he already have this? 
garcinia xanthochymus - i don't remember him ever mentioning it? 
manilkara bella - no idea how the fruit tastes but it's a beautiful tree
noronhia emarginata - another attractive tree, looks like a clusia but fruit tastes like lychee (haven't tasted it myself yet)
elaeagnus latifolia - nitrogen fixer with interesting fruit

what else?