The Tropical Fruit Forum

two of my cuttings are growing like crazy now that they are inside my grow tent with supplemental lighting. its humid and warm in there, guess they like it. i will post pics later

I pulled out all of my maypop vines. Something happened with my tongue and I now taste all of the off flavors. I tried juicing some and cannot get rid of the scent, it's the same as the unpleasant flavor if that makes sense.

The vines were becoming very invasive, a vine somehow got under the concrete path and traveled through and under the stucco on the side of the house and was pulling it off of the brick 😂

On the other hand I have 2 edulis fruit on 2 different seed grown vines that I pollinated with maypop pollen after castrating the edulis flowers. I did this cross last year but was too busy to care for the seeds, I planted them outside and nothing seems to have come back.

Shame they were the biggest size this season, but the fruit just tastes bad to me now.

If my crosses pan out I will backcross to maypop that I am going to keep in a container.

This is fruit from the plant I used so hopefully the bigger sizes is something that can be passed on.

They're all seedlings, nothing is fruiting yet

I take a bunch of semi-hard wood cuttings, score the bottom 1/2 inch or so and put them in moist cococoir. I leave some leaves at the top. The container gets put under a glass fish tank or plastic dome (big water bottle or 2 liter cut in half) and everything is away from direct sunlight. I actually put everything on a tabletop under a grey polyglazed gazebo so they dont get cooked by the sun. When there are sufficient roots, it takes a month for the first roots to show up, I pot them into individual pots.



 This could be scaled up. There are citrus cuttings in here now

After trying the fruit

Soft seeded! Sweet-tart is accurate. Kind of a berry flavor. Probably not hardy as it's soft seeded.
Unless it's been treated with hormones (to make the seeds soft)

~2 left

Maybe someone can chime in, as this is the only cold hardy variety I've experimented with (along with Wonderful which is not a zone 7 pom). The Wonderful dies to the ground every winter.

If I find some room I want to try Belbek, which is early, hard seeded, and VERY cold hardy below 0f. Would increase fruit set through pollination of both. Seeds don't bother me, I chew them or swallow them whole, good fiber 

~half way sold out

very nice, how is the flavor on that variety?

We've had a couple of 98 and 100 days during a heatwave this summer. Poms can take heat but this variety needs chill hours to bloom.

I bought seeds. Didn't want to risk an expensive plant to the elements so risked multiple seedlings instead.

Look up early satsumas. Xie Shan is one, takes a few years to produce very good quality fruits. Not for zone 7 though. Prague is the best bet for non-hybrid cold hardy citrus (it's a chimera). Fruit ripens Nov-Dec. Mine have survived 1 winter unprotected with some damage, zone 7a.

Here's some of the other grafts, they are either prague or morton. Tbuds that didn't push out. Pictures are from today. I forgot to label but easy to detect from leaves when they grow next season.








1 winter already survived:

Multi grafted taitri. Prague is the center trunk:


Prague trunk closeup




Prague on poncirus, 2 years old with 1 winter survived in ground. Grows very slowly. Rootstock is probably the culprit.




Prague on taitri, this was a small graft on a taitri branch inground I did last year that I thought died. The graft survived the winter and began to grow.
I clipped it off and rooted it with the branch. The left over branch on the tree I grafted with Bishop Citrandarin.


I will plant it out next spring, on taitri it will grow very fast compared to poncirus.