The Tropical Fruit Forum

We have a Valencia Pride air layer that is growing great at my dad's place. Most layers do need to be cut back. Full roots=1/2 to 1/3 cut back. If only a single root a single leaf cut in half is about all it can support (basically its a pre-rooted cutting at this point). Pot in well draining soil. Then, it should be in shade and misted frequently. For cuttings its 3 seconds every 5 minutes. Well rooted layers=2 minutes every half hour with our most set up. The idea is to keep the leaf wet without letting the soil get soggy. Cut the water at sun down and start it back up at sunrise. This usually requires a simple timer and some microjet heads on a Polly line. I've had pretty good success keeping various layers alive with this set up over the years. After the first flush hardens, they are usually rooted well enough to take out of the mist bed and slowly acclimated to full sun.

Here in 9b they die down in another few months and sprout back in the spring. I would plant in lightly moist soil and keep inside until the danger of frost is past. They do well in shade as long as it is not too deep. So, I assume they would survive the low light levels indoors just fine until spring. I consider it more of a conditioner than a shampoo. If you put it in your hair after a shower and let it naturally dry (which can take a while) your hair gets super soft and glossy.

Glad to hear it's a good fruit. I have decent sized tree and it also has rollinia sp. Peru too.
I guess another rollinia variant.

Is this Peru Rolinia more cold hardy?

Many years ago the festival was established as a way to market all the Kumquats being grown around Dade City. The last time that I went was 7-8 years ago. It had changed a lot since I was a kid. There were still a few kumquats being sold, but mostly it was just a typical "vendor event." Most of the Kumquat groves that I remembered had died--pretty sad. I had a lot of good memories of how I saved the seeds from a calamondin and from some Meiwa Kumquats that we later grew to fruiting trees. Its worth a trip if you are in the area, but I would not say it was worth coming all the way from Ohio just for the festival.

Does anyone have any leads for the Adara (aka Puente) plum that is used as a cherry rootstock/interstem? I finally have some plum rootstocks that survive long term here in Florida and would like to convert them to Christobalina cherry for my Dad. This is something he has wanted for years and I would like to make it a reality for him. Typical cherry rootstock is very poorly adapted here.

I wouldn't try this with seeds I was trying to sprout, but I have heard that black walnuts are sometimes husked by throwing them in the driveway and driving over them. May be something to keep in mind when you have loads of nuts... 20 years from now.

You could always sprout a cold hardy seed and then approach graft to your existing tree. Tha5 has a high success rate.

I agree, there is no need to buy a large bush. My advice is to buy a small bush and spend the extra on bird netting. You might get away with it for a few years if you only have a few bushes, but once they find you, they will strip the bushes.

Lychee freeze dries extremely well. It is the closest thing to fresh taste--just sweeter. A neighbor has a freeze dryer and we got some of our lychees back after they were dried. My Dad liked them so much that he wants to get a freeze dryer now!

I have put starfruit in my regular dehydrator. The taste was great, but the peel and "core" were tough. The texture would have been better if I had done spears and peeled them, but them they wouldn't have had the cute star shape.

Quote from: Galatians522 on September 20, 2023, 10:48:13 PM

Your idea sounds plausible. I read a description once explaining a method of propagating dwarf avocado rootstock. The desired rootstock variety was grafted onto a seedling and a metal ring was slipped over the graft at the time of grafting so that it would girdle the seedling rootstock and force the scion to root. The process obviously required that the graft be burried below the soil line.

On that note of girdling, do you think it would be best to "scar" above the graft union where the new scion has grown, so when that scar is planted underground, that new roots form from there?  So sort of like air layering, except instead of doing it the normal air layer way, I just bury the scar underground so that's where new roots begin?

For a girdle to really force rooting, you have to girdle all the way around. Simply wounding does not work in most species unless they also ground layer (like mudcadine grapes). The etoliation article Drymifolia posted looks more reliable. One of the keys that I noted in the article was that the shoots must be in the new growth stage when they are buried to etoliate. Otherwise, the cells won't be able to "switch gears" and start forming roots. Looks like your best option would be to cut it back and bury in perlite as soon as new shoots start forming. Then girdle and allow to root.

Well, at least you got it! Its interesting to see that it did indeed set fruit over the summer.

I bought one kilo of seed. It turns out that is equivalent to only 35 seeds. I sacrificed two of them today for research purposes. I dissected them by hitting them with a hammer.

The woody endocarp measures mostly 4-6mm thick, yet tapers to as little as 2mm near the pointed end. It is up to 9-10mm thick at the opposite end.
The seed coat itself is also fairly thick, measuring 0.5 - 1mm. Also the seed seems to be an unusual shape with different chambers.

I'm thinking this is part of the reason why the species is endangered. It's hard for me to see how this could be commercially viable. Using a hammer, the seed was very difficult to extract without breaking into many small pieces. Even small fragments were difficult to extract from their chamber. Perhaps there is some specially designed tool specific to this species. Development of such a tool could help with conservation, since the species is mostly exploited locally for timber, and it doesn't sound like there are too many people planting trees, because they are one of the slower-growing timber species of the most commonly cultivated timber species of eastern Peru.

The seeds were delicious. Perhaps slightly better than the commercial walnut.

I started using the bench grinder on some seeds, but realized it was too tedious, so abandoned that idea. I only grinded 6 seeds (enough for two pots) so I will get to use these six as an experiment to see how they compare with the others, which I will not be sanding/grinding. For whatever reason it dulled the stone on my bench grinder, which is now smooth instead of a rough surface.

I've also decided to do the three day soak for all seeds as recommended by the Chanchamayo forestry publication I downloaded.

Of the six seeds I grinded, I took off maybe only a couple millimeters of endocarp on each seed. I'm not expecting much difference in germination times to be honest. I figure given ample organic matter, the endocarps and seed coats will undergo their process of decomposition at relatively the same rate.

Since the seed coats themselves are so thick, I suppose it's possible to separate the seeds from the endocarp and plant them without any endocarp, but I really don't have the knowledge to know how to separate the seed. Like I said, the shape of the seed looks a little weird and I don't see how I would extract it without breaking it in the process.

Looks like a Black Walnut that got crossed with a mockernut hickory. Please let us know how it goes.

I tried growing some Jewels a couple of years ago in a raised bed filled with a mixture of topsoil and pine bark, which is supposed to provide the acidic spil blueberries like. They grew for a few months, produced a few berries, then declined, turned brown and died one by one. At a total loss as to what happened but I give up on any further attempts. Additionally, what berries they produced were snatched by birds just as they ripened. How can you grow berries when the birds swipe them?

If I wanted to grow some again just for my family, I would buy small cheap plants like in the link I posted and spend the savings on bird netting. You can cover 10 plants pretty easily. Ph should not have been much of an issue in most Florida soils north of Lake Okechobee. Phytophera root rot is the biggest problem and we lost many bushes to that disease. Blueberries are all grown own root from cuttings, but I would seriously consider grafting to Sparkleberry (Vaccinum arboreum) since it is an incredibly tough and adaptable rootstock. UF has done some studies and the two are compatible.