The Tropical Fruit Forum

Rain has helped harvest white sapote fruits. Mainly Pike and Vernon.  Rotting well, smell of vinegar, don't walk there.

Recent fertilizing?  Have not seen that before, resembles avocado starting to drop last year's leaves, but the leaves look fresh.  I barely water my white sapotes, not at all with the recent rains.  The trees here (similar to your climate) are pretty bullet-proof, more like weeds. 

What Scott said! 

I have around 39 mature macadamia trees and have potted many for sharing. In my experience, they just don't like pots.  Poor ragged little trees just take off when planted in the ground.

Had 4 in trunk cherimoyas cut down by freezes and also my lucuma knocked back to 3 inch wood.  Not much except new growth on white sapotes damaged.  Not happening any more as we have seen a change in winter temps (and rainfall, sadly)

Have a number of White Sapotes here in Central Coast of CA.  Trees are over 30 years old and have taken 19, 20 degrees with no damage.  Smaller ones do indeed get hit, but recover.  Low temperature, duration, humidity, and plant condition factor in relative to damage.  Our summer nights are cool (45 degrees), daytime temps in 70s.  The trees never have a lush growth due to cooler temps.  A growth flush from warm days followed by a freeze would certaiunly be detrimental.  Most of our trees are multigrafted and the different varieties seem to tolerate our frosts/freezes easily.  In the past few years we have experienced very few frost/freezing nights due to global warming and infact rarely get apricots (a previous commercial growing area) as not enough winter chill.  Been at this location for almost 50 years and the winters are indeed changing.  Use to use smudge pots (return stack heaters) and covers, but now rarely see any damage now (probably will pay for this comment this winter!)

Have not tried to root cuttings, yet.  Overdid the macadamia thing when told they would not grow here.  Once a new tree produces there are then lots of seeds to plant. I cannot remember time to production as I had grafted ones too.  Neighbor I supplied seeds just had first crop, about 5 years. I have, over the years, sent seeds around.  Hopefully they are trees now.  Baja CA has been my goto place for many years and fellow CRFG members have provided trees to the orphanage in Colnet.  Inspiring is to see the acreage of trees providing a cash crop to those dedicated folks.

Our climates are similar and different from that in FLA.  We have done the Protea family also: Banksia, Leucospermum, leucadendrons, Protea flowers.  Many from sources in S. Africa and Aus, but Jo in Ventura (Australia Native Plants) has a great nursery for them too.

As to varieties, the seedlings, in many cases, can be superior to those grafted ones I have.  My best graft is called L-1 (sweet), another is Z-3 due to the nut crackout size, maybe Aus or NZ selections.  Cate does not do well for me here, but it certainly does well in San Diego County.  Couple of the HAES (Hawaii Agricultural Experimental Station) varieties (747, 752) are prolific, but nothing special.  I think I have been more rewarded by seedlings when grown out than variety selections.  Beaumont is a very good variety and a beautiful tree with the red veining pink flowers and drops nuts all year.
I grew out many seedlings to evaluate them and have been pleased with the nut quality.  I did graft selections onto many of the seedlings just to retain the variety.  Did take a number of trees down to an orphanage in Baja CA and they have been successful there and have been reproduced.  We are in sand dune sand 300 ft deep, pH is 5.0.  Earlier (45 yrs ago) I lost little macadamia trees to frost, but since they have matured and hardened off they experience no effects from the cold (and now with "global warming" we don't see the freezes anymore).  Trialing some mangos now, picked one fruit to save a overstressed little tree. This is a gamble.

How old are the cutting-grown trees? 

Don't think they (seeds) care.  When we used to get rain and damp soli, seeds germinated on their own.

Years ago a CRFG group did a taste test of the yellow sapote (Casimiroa tetrameria) choosing  #6 and #7.  Of the two #7 was considered the better.  Taste can vary depending on stage of ripeness.  The results were written up in an old yearbook.  I had a seedling that produced fruits with an awful aftertaste.  It was grafted over to yellow sapote #7.

Go out and check the leaves at night with a flash light. 

Yellow sticky traps work in the greenhouse.  Here in CA, putting infected plants outside for a week allows natural predators to take care of the problem.

I actually had a bunch of cuttings in a compost pile produce roots.  Try cuttings in milled peat moss.