The Tropical Fruit Forum

Which is it? Can't remember. Apparently one is a cut above the rest, whereas the others aren't even considered "true" cinnamon..Some of the inferior species I've heard are actually somewhat toxic.

There are only a few spots on our land where Avocados have done OK. We started direct-planting more from seed, which has been more successful, but I think it will always be an uphill battle for the most part to have good avocado production here.

Our location is in Amazonia, but with a distinct dry season between June and October. Rainfall is pretty low this time of year. We only received 1.8 inches this year in July. August seems like it might turn out to be even less than that. These are typically the two driest months of the year. The soil is naturally acidic here for the most part, and of course it was leached over multiple decades following deforestation, which made it more acidic, so recommendations should be for a fruit that grows well in acidic conditions. Some parts of the property have pretty bad aluminum saturation, such as the spot from the soil analysis I'm going to share. Would be good for the recommended species to be aluminum resistant. I took the soil sample from the least productive part of the property. Some areas are night and day by comparison, but still I've seen Avocado only thrive in a few key spots, and even those will probably require continued addition of lime in the future.

Someone suggested Macadamias might be good for acidic soil. Well we tried about one hundred trees and only one has performed decently. Most died.

Results from our Avocado foliar analysis are pending.

I'd like to grow something equivalent to Avocado, but I know there is no substitute. Something fatty and delicious would be nice. Maybe tropical Walnut (Juglans neotropica) or Dipteryx alata. Preferably something with a big seed that I can direct sow, which will have enough energy to get the shoot taller than our Brachiaria grasses within the first six months of growth. How about Bertholettia excelsa? Would you recommend African Oil Palm? Surprisingly seeds of many species are hard to find in Peru, as it's not like in the US where you just go online. You really have to know someone in an area where there are trees, and the person has to be trustworthy enough to provide you with fresh stock. Out of all the species I mentioned, I think the African Oil Palm seeds would be the easiest to acquire. We are at about 900m elevation, which gets a little cooler than the low jungle, but I still find it plenty hot. In the dry season most days are sunny and top out at 90 degrees. I haven't gotten solid data on annual rainfall ( just installed a rain gauge last month) for our location. I would say somewhere between 2000-3000mm avg. annual rainfall based on some of the data I've seen for other towns nearby in drier microclimates.

We're three years into this. So most areas already have significant canopy cover with a couple different Inga spp., Schizolobium, and the local Erythrina spp. Therefore, I think some "higher order" trees might perform well being sown at this stage.

The topsoil in our sample surprised me a bit. I wasn't expecting to see the pH that high and the organic matter at 2.58% is higher than I expected. That result is even after excluding the top two inches, because we've been running chickens and other poultry through the area over the past few months, and I didn't want their manure to affect the results too much. The subsoil is still about as awful as when we started three years ago though.

Just a warning though: This is a pretty extreme example. It is the area on the property where we've seen the least amount of growth from all tree species we planted 3 years ago. Some died, and most just sat there stunted. They have been unable to compete satisfactorily with the Brachiaria, whereas in other areas of the property we have seen satisfactory tree growth amongst Brachiaria.

Test Results:

This was off the record, so I'm not sure I should be reporting it, but I remember about eight years ago talking with one of the senior researchers at the USDA lab near Ft. Pierce. I think his name was Randall Neidz. He was talking about how that disease was pretty much decimating the entire crop of oranges in Florida. He showed me some charts indicating the steady decline, and said the outlook was bleak. Basically he predicted an entire collapse of the Florida citrus industry. He said even if they were able to fast-track some sort of GMO citrus, which would still take a minimum of two years, the processing plants were built with a certain volume in mind, and the lack of volume during that interim period would supposedly cause everything to go bust.

Anyway, don't quote me on that. I'm just paraphrasing the guy.

So, what ever happened with that situation?

Here we


use chlorpyrifos in a powdered form, which doesn't work very well. You powder their entrances and lines, and hope for the best. I even get on hands and knees and blow some of the powder down the entrance. Inevitably in a week or so, they will be back, rinse and repeat for weeks on end.
 
A biological agent would work better.

Edit: Here's a nice article from Brazil where scientists conducted an experiment with some sort of processed orange pulp as a carrier bait into which they infused sulfluramid at 0.3% concentration. Apparently the ants incorporated more of the sulfluramid pellets into their nest than even the control group (the processed orange pulp without any insecticide). That might have just been a coincidence, but the mechanism of action sounds very convincing to me.
The sulfluramid is very slow acting, so the worker ants don't perceive the compound. The ants feed this bait to their fungus and only after the bait has been incorporated into the fungus, does the sulfluramid start to affect the worker ants. The workers are not able to associate the bait as being the source of toxicity as they are able to do with more acute toxins from their environment. The article states that after three or four days the ants stop harvesting plant material from the landscape, and all individuals die 16-22 days following the treatment.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0085562619300755

Sounds promising to me. Now I just have to see if I can find a product with this chemical composition.

I was looking at some plant lists of what can grow in acidic soil, and blueberry popped out at me, because the chart said its low end begins at 4.0pH, which is pretty darn acidic.

In Peru, they actually cultivate blueberries in the coastal region. They even find their way to the local markets here in Rioja. I really don't know much about the technicalities of how they're doing it. Yet, I assume that whatever cultivars they're using would probably be successful here in the jungle. We're about 5-6 degrees from the equator and blessed with acidic soil. Before we planted our property, we sent a few soil samples from various spots to the local lab. The lowest reading we got back was 4.76 and the highest 5.06

Edit: Just started reading a Peruvian thesis. Apparently the cultivar, "Biloxi" accounts for 90% of the commercial production in Peru.

I came across this guy's youtube channel, and thought I should share the link to his gofundme on here, because his project sounds relevant to this forum. I don't know the guy, and I won't donate, because we are still investing a lot into our own place with no sign of profitability on the horizon anytime soon. But maybe others are interested. As you may know, many tropical ecosystems are being degraded at an alarming rate. This is one project that should serve as a good example for the region to heal the land:
https://www.gofundme.com/f/regenerating-degraded-land-in-honduras?utm_campaign=p_lico+share-sheet&utm_medium=copy_link&utm_source=customer

Just noticed this small understory tree fruiting today in our primary forest section of the property. Something about the way it looked I just had to try it. It tastes pretty good somewhat reminiscent of a caimito, but the flesh is insubstantial. If no one knows just from the fruit pictures, I'll see if I can get a photo of the leaves too.

I peeled away the upper petals for the photo:

I'm curious to know what are some good ways to propagate Walnut from seed. I found a woman locally that gave us a couple seeds (including shell) of Juglans neotropica, the Andean Walnut. She might be able to get us more, and I would really like to have this tree growing on our property. I've read that it should do OK here, even though it would prefer a little cooler temperatures.

I've read some literature suggesting to remove the shell before sowing in the nursery. I really don't want to risk removing the shell, and rotting the kernel. Perhaps an alternative would be to sand the shell with sand paper just to file away a couple millimeters.

Another concern about growing in the nursery is the root system. Do you think the roots would get knoted and/or pot-bound? Does it have a huge taproot? Would it be better to just direct sow in the final location out in the field, by burying it under a small mound of compost and sawdust?

I planted these about twelve years ago as a small potted palm without any feather leaves yet. If memory serves me correctly, I bought them from a backyard nursery in SLO county from a guy named Perry who was a member of the IPS. These palms are very drought-tolerant, and basically have subsisted on the natural rainfall of Santa Barbara.

Here's a current photo, and a photo from ten years ago. The seeds of this species have a good flavor, but I never had any that tasted better than the coquitos of Jubaea chilensis.

There's a gentleman on this forum with an Avocado farm in the San Diego area who posted a poll a couple months ago, about which Avocado varieties people would buy. I recall a comment from him talking about how certain varieties of Avocado were prone to flopping over.

We had three in one part of our property. They all looked pretty healthy. They're too young to fruit. One fell because it had Elephant grass as a windbreak, which we removed too abruptly. The other two don't seem like they're in a very wind-exposed part of the property, and they also are otherwise very healthy. Everything is dependent on the natural rainfall here. 99 percent of the trees on our property don't have any problems like that, it is just this handful of Avocado trees, which are either seed-grown (most likely), Hass, or Fuerte.

I don't know if Ice Cream Beans are the fastest-producing fruit tree in the world, but they are the fastest-producing fruit tree on our property here in Peru. Many started getting multiple fruit even before they were two years old from seed. Obviously I'm not counting bananas, but that's almost as fast as bananas anyway.

Here's some footage from our farm:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHs3aHoqQYQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fydtcJnTrXs

Are there any members on here that live in Peru?