The Tropical Fruit Forum

Does anyone here grow oil palm without a lot of inputs in poor soil? Seems like these are universally cultivated in histosols.

Using avos and mangos as an example, most of the Hass and Fuerte die, and the rootstock takes over and does OK. To be fair though, even the avos from seed are hit or miss here.

Mangos. Kent and Edward. They do OK, definitely stunted compared to seedling mangos, and not at all vigorous. Some stems look kind of sooty, but they usually can putter along, death is very rare. Seedling mangos grow beautifully and vigorously across the board. Pretty much no pest problems or disease problems ever, and are leaving the grafted mangos in the dust by far when it comes to the size of the trees.

I bought a piece of Atemoya fruit from Robert is Here fruit stand in Homestead. The piece of fruit was in a fridge when I bought it. I saved the seeds and planted them about two weeks later. That was in May, here we are Oct 1, and none of the seeds have sprouted.

From the same time frame, I also planted seeds of Sapodilla, Canistel, Star Apple, Katuk, and Pitomba. Many of those seeds sprouted months ago, but nothing from the Atemoya seeds. Is Atemoya a sterile hybrid? Did the refrigeration kill the seeds? Maybe the fruit was irradiated?

Is it safe to say that those seeds will not sprout this late? I'd like to use the pots and soil for something else.

Does anyone here have any experience growing vanilla orchids from seed? I found someone locally who can get me pods of Vanilla pompona and planifolia. I'm guessing the seeds aren't viable for long. Someone told me that they would require a laboratory to propagate from seed. Why would that be? I've grown all sorts of plant species from extremely small seeds, by just covering the seed trays with plastic. What is it about the vanilla that would require a laboratory?

I can get cuttings too for about 3-5USD depending on species, but I'd really like to have a couple thousand small seedling plants, especially since that amount of cuttings would break the budget.

Part 2 here: https://tropicalfruitforum.com/index.php?topic=55330.0

There's been a few plants that we planted at our place that I've overlooked for the past four years. When someone sells you a plant down here, you really can't be 100% certain that it is what they say.

So, here are a few plants from our farm that I've been paying attention to lately that I'm not sure we've identified correctly. The first part of the series I will share a plant that I basically have no idea what it is, other than I think I remember hearing the name, Mamey Rojo, attached to it in conversation four years ago. It looks nothing like Pouteria sapota, nor is it Mammea americana. Therefore, I doubt it is any species of Mamey, so don't let that name throw you off. It's probably something completely different. Maybe it's not even a fruiting tree, who knows. I haven't seen any fruit on it, but it seems to be constantly flowering. We've fertilized it plenty over the years, and the ducks and geese have been using it as a shade tree this year, so it has all the fertility it would ever need to produce fruit, but so far just flowers all the time for about 2 years straight now.

Edit: I just cheated and used google search by image, so now I think I know what it is.

But maybe someone else wants to see if they can guess without using image search.

I was thinking about getting one of those pickers that's basically a set of pruners at the end of a telescopic pole.
Here's an example:
https://www.amazon.com/Smarkey-Telescopic-Extendable-Harvester-Telescoping/dp/B08BFK2HPL/ref=sr_1_18?s=lawn-garden&sr=1-18

None of the other pickers with a basket or "finger" design would work as we have a lot of stubborn fruits like Annona where the stems do not separate. If you try forcing it the stem will just pull away a good portion of the inside of the fruit and you'll end up with mostly only skin harvested and some sort of rotting mess left in the canopy. So we're getting lots of these fruits and they are on pretty tall trees. The trees will just keep getting taller too. The stems of the fruit need to be cut in order to harvest properly. I've measured some fruit stems that are thicker than 1cm, so cutting capacity is a major factor in making a decision.

One other picker candidate would be a pole saw with a back end that can function as a pruner/lopper that you pull with a rope. The advantage with those is that they are by far the longest option. Example:
https://www.amazon.com/Upgraded-Branches-Pruning-Trimmer-Extendable/dp/B0CNCLQ3LW/ref=sr_1_4?s=lawn-garden&sr=1-4

I don't think I'd ever use the saw portion though. Imagine getting the saw snagged in a branch 30ft up. My main concern with those as a fruit picker is that the rope/pulley/lopper portion seems to stick out quite a bit, and it might get caught on branches or otherwise be difficult to finesse within the crown of a tree to isolate the stem of a fruit and make a clean cut without banging into fruit, branches, trunk, leaves, etc. and causing damage to the tree. Another disadvantage: As far as I can tell they don't have a way to grab the stem, and they don't have a basket/bag, which means the fruit is going to fall. An advantage is their cutting capacity. They can all handle fairly thick diameter stems/branches compared to the options marketed as fruit pickers.

Of course, the main factor is what we can reasonably acquire down here in Peru. I don't think shipping a pole saw that weighs over 10 pounds is going to be economical. Even those pruner-style telescopic fruit pickers are usually around 2 meters when unextended.

There are some domestic options like this:


But the longest version available now is only 4m. All distributors are out of stock of the 5 meter versions. And they aren't going to get any for a few months if ever.

I think it would be silly in our case to get anything smaller than 5 meters. Otherwise we will find ourselves needing another longer unit in a couple years.

There's a 5.5 meter version available on Ali-Express, but with shipping it ends up being about twice as expensive as one of the 5m ones that are sold domestically. It would be great if there were one of these pruner-style options that was significantly longer, yet 5.5 meters is the longest option I could find.

Just wondering if any of this made it onto the radar of the media in the USA?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JFx_xGhugU

It looks like things are shaping up to be even worse this year. March is typically the rainiest month of the year here, and it turned out to be a huge disappointment. Way below normal. Haven't been too impressed so far with April either. My wife's from a village where the river (the Huallaga) overflows typically in March and April. It hasn't even come close this year. We need to start getting a lot of rain for that to happen, but the problem is May & June is typically the start of the dry season.

I've seen a huge difference here just since we moved here. Something's off about it. The way we used to get rain all day or all night. Now we might get the same sort of clouds, but we're lucky if they drop more than a millimeter. I've heard a lot of people comment this year about how there's hardly any coffee, and It's been a long time since we had a big rain event. I installed a rain gauge last year in July, which is the middle of the dry season. The biggest rain event between then and now was back in October:  3.52 inches.

The way it fails to rain often is a little unnerving. This area will be in big trouble if things don't change.

What do you know about this as a fertilizer/soil amendment? We have a huge rice industry here as well as a brick industry. The brickyards mostly all use rice husks for fuel. Some places give away the resultant ash.

Some concerns I have are that the rice production is subjected to lots of chemicals: pesticides, fungicides. I would assume all of this would be volatilized when burned, but maybe not? I also can't really find any proper analysis that would mention the percentage of N P K Ca Mg S and its CaCO3 equivalence. Softwood ash has about a 30% lime equivalence, but a short-term residual liming effect, so it doesn't seem like it would be very effective to decrease subsoil Aluminum saturation. I can't imagine that rice husk ash would have a significantly longer term effect than wood ash.

Here's one source:
The rice husk ash (RHA) was produced from rice husks pellets (6 mm in diameter) burned in a boiler with a rotary grate, specially designed for producing biofuels. The burning temperature inside the combustion chamber was kept below the melting temperature of the ash and reached 980 to 1030 °C. The combustion temperature at the outlet of the chamber ranged from 750 to 920 °C. The time of complete combustion of the rice husks was in the range of 4 to 6 min. The pH of the used RHA was 10.7 and the material contained 0.27% of N, 4.02% of C, 1.45% of P, 0.6% of Mg, 3.88% of K, 0.51% of Ca, 0.05% of S and 0.08% of Na.

No idea the temperatures used here and all those other parameters, but those nutrients percentages are very low.  By comparison, the Umass.edu table
shows wood ash (guessing its hardwood)
Wood ashes - N0 P2 K6 Ca20 Mg1

Maybe if I can talk to the airforce to do a flyover and get them to drop a few tanker loads worth of the stuff, I think it could be promising.

He has some webinars that are worth checking out. Here's a screenshot from one webinar from the Advancing Eco Agriculture youtube channel titled, Why insects do not (and cannot) attack healthy plants _ Dr. Thomas Dykstra _ Regenerative Ag

Looking across the landscape, there's Mangos, Avocados, Cashews, Spondias purpurea, Ice Cream Beans, Majambo, Surinam Cherry, Camu Camu... and I'm sure there are many others.

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.

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