The Tropical Fruit Forum

Does anyone here make there own biochar? If so, what is your recipe?

Do you think it would be OK to use just the broken down litter layer, and the very thin topsoil layer of our tropical forest soil to fill 3-gallon plant pots for growing jackfruit seeds?

They don't have any good potting soil products available locally. There is some pretty poor compost (looks similar to very small wood chips mixed with ash) available from the municipality. None of our homemade compost is anywhere close to being ready, and we want to get the ball rolling with starting Jackfruit in air-prune pots.

I'm looking for fresh Katuk seeds. I was gifted about three white Katuk fruits from ECHO last year, and obtained about 6 seeds total. I planted them three weeks after they were harvested (keeping them within their fruit until just before planting time), and one of them actually germinated successfully. It has become a decent-sized bush in a year, and I have already taken cuttings from it. The bush has been flowering profusely since it was about 3 months old, but it has never produced a single fruit, so I'm guessing they require cross-pollination with another genetically-distinct individual.

I was strongly cautioned NOT to grow the plant from seeds while at ECHO, but apparently success is possible with very fresh seed. I'd be interested in some seeds next month ( late September) if anyone can time some fruiting for then.

This is a seedling avocado tree six degrees from the equator, so probably has nothing to do with day length. My guess is the plant is still young and hasn't built up enough root reserves to support both flowering and leaf growth/maintenance at the same time. The picture's from about 2-3 weeks ago. Since then, the tree has started developing leaf growth, but still some bare patches here and there. Still flowering profusely. Seems like the plant is flowering at the expense of leaves. What would cause that?

We have a big avocado tree that's about 20ft tall by 20ft wide. It is five-six years old and has now started to flower profusely. One of the big lateral branches recently broke. No big winds, nothing fell on it. It broke in a spot about 2ft from the trunk. Not a clean break. It's still attached a little bit on the underside of the branch, and the break looks very jagged with lots of "splinters" sticking out.
I might expect something like this if the branch were loaded with fruit, but it's still in the flowering stage right now.
What do you think caused the branch to break?

This is a pasture legume. The new growth is worse than the old growth. Google image search says Bean Golden Mosaic Virus. Are there any nutritional deficiencies associated with that?

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.