The Tropical Fruit Forum

Great reviews! Do you know if they mostly fruit at the same time or if it varies by variety?  Fwang Tung is reported to be from Thailand, Sri Kembangan from Malaysia, etc.

Viejo would be your best bet to grow there since the fruit are so small unless you protect it during cold snaps.

Viejo is supposed to have a shorter duration from flower to fruit for mamey of about 12 months.

Josh Jamison at Cody Cove Farm near Lake Wales has viejo growing in the ground. It had small fruits starting to form when we visited last December, as a relatively small tree.

looks like a lot of people like white sapote I never heared of it I’ll probably get a tree or seeds soon!

If you can get wooly sapote (C. tetrameria) seeds/rootstock and graft different varieties of white sapote (C. edulis), it may fruit successfully for you in a pot and stay dwarf. Jack, Nipomo in CA has reported this, https://tropicalfruitforum.com/index.php?topic=48921.msg472057#msg472057, and seems key for small yards or container growing.

I don't think there's anything wrong with growing in containers longer term (check out Virginia Fruit Grower for one example) or making a living in another field and growing fruit for fun. If you'll be up north for awhile, some of the botanic gardens have greenhouses that grow tropical fruit and you might try volunteering at one of those.

Re: mamey, everyone's tastes are different, experimenting is part of the fun

When do your different varieties ripen?

Also interested in direct shipping to FL if that's an option!

Yangmei and white sapote! Would love to see these grown here. Congrats on your recent purchase

Make sure that you have paths/rows so you can move wheelbarrows and the like. I just saw the edulis design food forest, and there were lots of paths and the whole forest was very open to the sun. I have always imagined walking through a food forest like a rain forest; trees overhead as you walk through. I guess I need to rethink that, but how open should a food forest be?

Yeah it looks open to the sun because the overstory trees (mango, avocado, etc) haven't grown in yet, which can take 10+ years. I'd guess the spacing is about 15'-20' for those larger trees, but if you won't be pruning you may want more like 20-25'+ spacing.

Paths/rows are great for sun/airflow/maintenance access. In humid areas, airflow is really important to prevent mold/disease. Plus it's really difficult to wade through a sea of vegetation when trying to pick fruit.

I've also heard garcinias, starfruit, some annonas, black sapote and silas wood sapodilla can handle some shade. Bananas and papayas can go anywhere until the overstory grows out, but bananas like moisture and papayas don't like much moisture in my experience.

A general rule of thumb is to place taller trees to the north (or south down under) to limit shading and maximize available sunlight, but this is more critical for smaller sites with less space. And of course don't forget to plant pollinators and nitrogen fixers.

JR mentioned using G.890 for the custom grafted apple trees he sells, which I believe is on the larger end of apple rootstocks but still semi-dwarf.

Thanks for sharing the blog post, that does seem to make sense about standard rootstock performing better in the south given the general low vigor of apples here. It looks like Malus doumeri var. formosana grows to about 15-20'.

New Zealand Monty's Surprise (supposed to be "low chill" but unknown how low) on standard rootstock with Granny Smith for pollination is on my wish list to try out!

Galatians, you may already know about Stone River Nursery in Orlando who's growing and experimenting with lots of different apples, an overview is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-G7QymgJqM. I saw another video last year about rootstock/grafting/interstock/etc that he's using but can't remember the details.

It was exciting to see apples fruiting in central FL! Jan Doolin's videos are great too.

Re: Rootstock, suckering and long-term graft compatibility were mentioned as potential issues with grafting yangmei to M. cerifera rootstock in early FL USDA trials (https://journals.flvc.org/fshs/article/download/99102/95087/0).

It'd be interesting to know what happened to the yangmei plants imported by USDA to Gainesville and Groveland, FL (and TX and GA).

The University of Georgia reported 33-78% success rooting semi-hardwood cuttings in their 2019-2022 yangmei trials (https://ipps.org/uploads/docs/5b_sr_hutzell_2023.pdf) but very low success with hardwood cuttings.

brian, was it still fruiting? It looks like there might be a few on the ground in your photo but it's hard to tell. I've heard the flavor can vary.

Quote from: RS on January 09, 2025, 08:23:29 PM

Leu Gardens in Orlando also has a fruiting kwai muk. Although the sign says it fruits in summer and fall, it was dropping lots of fruit a couple weeks ago in late December.

 

Nice, I am heading to Orlando tomorrow I will check it out

Awesome! They have a lot of fruit trees sprinkled in random places throughout the garden, e.g. Kwai muk is at the corner heading to the gazebo/"Idea Garden", fruiting ficus auriculata is by the "Tropical Stream Garden", jabos/eugenias near the gazebo/pavilion area, ficus sycomorus and a fruiting Sapodilla near the veggie garden, fruiting Bael is along the path to the house museum by the lake.

Also be sure to check out the overflow/staff parking lot at the very front which houses the tropical fruit collection. I had no idea this was there until asking about white sapotes (at the far end of the parking lot near the locked exit gate). Brazilian milk fruit was also fruiting. It'd be great if someone made a fruit tour video at Leu Gardens

CarolinaZone, curious which non-astringent Chinese varieties were you interested in/where have you heard about these?

I can find very little info aside from the technical abstract below (can't access the full paper).

CHINESE PERSIMMON GERMPLASM RESOURCES.
Authors:     W. Renzi, Y. Yong, L. Gaochao
Keywords:     China, Diospyros sp., germplasm resources, persimmon
DOI:     10.17660/ActaHortic.1997.436.3

Abstract:
China is one of the original countries of persimmon. There is only one genus and 63 species in persimmon family, most of them are distributed in tropic and sub-tropic zone. 19 species had been utilized, 10 species are used as pomology. There is about 3 thousand - year history for persimmon cultivation in China. Varieties had emerged before one thousand - year, there are more than 900 varieties up to now. They are all astringent except “Loutian sweet persimmon”, there are few superfine resources in them, and there are 30 main varieties. Annual yield of fresh persimmon was 731 thousand ton, an increase of 33.1 percent than ten years ago. In recent years, there were rapid increase in yield in some south provinces of China, but the major regions of production is in north of China. Shaanxi, Henan, Shanxi, Shandong and Hebei, these 5 provinces make up above 57 percent of the total yield of the country. This paper described first persimmon resources survey of original country China. It supplied information for horticulture circles exploiting this species.