The Tropical Fruit Forum

Reedo, how long has this Nettie been fruiting? Also, have you had a lot of rain lately? Both conditions can influence fruit taste.

The tree is probably 5 years old and 15' tall. This is its second year fruiting. We've had a normal amount of rain. The tree is going in ground in sandy soil. Some fruit are excellent, sweet, and richly flavored. Some are the same, but with substantial bitterness. Others aren't ripening properly, developing the water core, which basically seems like the fruit is ripening unevenly, from the seed out towards the skin, leaving the center overripe by the time the fruit fully ripens.

We've had a few mild frosty nights that burned some banana leaves, but it didn't seem to slow down this plant's new growth. It has a little half-dome cover of plastic for protection from our last downpour. 

My experience is anecdotal, but before I had a flowering male, my female did produce smaller seedless fruit. I can't speak to how reliably a female might fruit without a male nearby, or if my experience was a fluke. At first I thought perhaps my Mountain Papaya was pollinating it, but there weren't any seeds. My male plant started flowering shortly after that and my female began making much larger fruit with seeds. I'll see if I can find the photos.

Quote from: Reedo on January 26, 2025, 10:48:32 PM

Quote from: Food4all on January 19, 2025, 04:19:56 AM

Does anybody have any cuttings available? I would like to try to graft chicken claw to one of my trees

I'll have some in summer. Feel free to PM me in summer. Mine are pushing new growth right now. I'll have some 1g plants too. I'm going to wait for them to fill out their roots a little more before sending any off.

Thanks for the offer! I'm good on figs for now. Our climate doesn't quite get hot enough to ripen most mid or late season figs, and I already have too many fig plants. Haha...

Thats great!! I will do that, ty 🙏👍. Btw if you grow figs and are interested in some cuttings lmk, I got a bunch left from my trees

Here is an update. I planted this plant in the ground in late summer. It has a banana growing over it, has a rock wall behind it, and below it. Once temps dropped, I stopped giving it water, but our sandy soil has stayed moist due to rain. I recently piled up some fresh wood chips around it in hopes they would raise air temps a couple degrees around it. We've had several nights of light frost, but the plant is in a micro-climate location that doesn't seem to frost. Interestingly, the lead branch arrested growth as soon as night temps dipped below 50ºf, but it appears several branches of new growth have emerged close to the soil level. They pushed new growth before I piled chips around it. The plant doesn't look great, but it looks a lot better than I thought it would. While the leaves don't look great, there doesn't appear to be any dieback on the stem, despite it being green wood.

I have some male and female I can cut for you. If $30 for two of each (including shipping) sounds good to you, shoot me a PM. Should be done soon, as mine are just starting to wake up. I'm in Central CA.

I have a 15 gallon fruiting one here in south San Diego that I may want to sell.

What would you say its cold tolerance is?

Quote from: Reedo on August 29, 2024, 10:51:30 PM

Mine just fruited for the first time. Pretty sweet tasty.

Good on ya! Shame we don't have them in down here in Australia.
I might have to buy seeds at some stage, but are they better than the good ol' English Black, or whatever grows wild in the USA? I Just want to make sure that whatever I do is worth my time, money and effort.

It's very good, but if you're just starting to acquire mulberries, I wouldn't go out of your way to get this one. It's similar to the other Himalayan types, but has a very novel leaf shape. There are many excellent selections already in circulation where you are. Marta has a nice blog that details a lot of them.

https://fruitsandgardening.blogspot.com/search?q=mulberries

This cultivar has probably been posted already. Nettie white sapote.

Mine just fruited for the first time. Pretty sweet tasty.

Another vote for Poha / Cape Gooseberries. Cherimoyas and some of the other Annonas seem to fruit in ~3 years. Guavas fruit pretty quickly too. Mulberries fruit very quickly when grafted onto established rootstock. Rooted cuttings of figs can fruit in 0-2 years.

Quote from: sc4001992 on June 18, 2024, 12:54:15 PM

There is large fruit size white sapote that tests very good, as good as any I have tasted. You should get the Selk or CT#7, see my photos. These fruits are very good tasting. How you tried either of these fruits. Also, Cuccio gets very large, but I like these two over Cuccio.

I'll be able to taste my seedling McDill fruits this year and people say it is on the large size but it doesn't look as large as the two I mentioned above.

I've had Selck and Cuccio, and they're good but aren't quite as good as the best ones I've eaten. Even within a single cultivar on a single tree, white sapotes vary a lot. I'm no expert on them, so this is just based on trying maybe 20 varieties. But the best two varieties I've had are Walton and @ScottR's Rainbow seedling.

Yeah, McDill is a huge fruit but I put it in the middle of the pack -- sweet and bland. At least it's a really consistent fruit.

Among the widely available and productive varieties, Vernon is a good choice, because a good Vernon fruit is really good, decent sized, and the trees are productive and precocious.

Is the "@ScottR's Rainbow seedling" circulated as "Robert's Rainbow", or is that something different? Any chance you got to see the tree's growth habit? My grafted Robert's Rainbow finally started to take off, so I'm going to get it in the ground. Curious if it's going to be a monster tree like my Walton.