The Tropical Fruit Forum

If anyone from the US has any Peanut Butter Tree seeds they'd like to sell please PM me. Looking to buy about a dozen seeds with fruit surrounding them or in moist substrate so they are still viable.

Curiosity got the better of me one day and I bought a feijoa from Home Depot 4 years ago. It's gotten big, bushy and flowered like crazy the last 2 years but no fruit. 2 years ago I put a a little seedling right next to it and this year it's big enough where I think it might flower.

Has anyone ever bought one of these "pineapple guavas" from HD or Lowes and had them fruit? If so, how was the quality of the fruit? Or are these just ornamentals for the most part?

Assuming I'm going to have to graft a proven cultivar on this Home Depot plant, any ideas where to go about locating budwood?

**Edit**

Sigh. Meant to put this in the main forum. Mods please delete

I was going to post this in the "Fruit Thieves" topic I saw a few days ago but I don't see it anymore. I must be losing it.

Got a call an hour ago from a friend I met a little over a year ago. He's an older Mexican gentleman who works part time for the school district in landscaping. He has a big backyard with 3 green/shade houses and hundreds of grafted and seedling mangoes. I give him budwood and he grafts and grows them for me. But he refuses to accept any money. I stopped asking because I think it annoys him. I give him any supplies, budwood, seedlings of other trees, and purchased plants that he'll accept which isn't very much. I gave him 18 scions 2 months ago purchased through a seller here of which 15 took.

Anyways, he calls me and says to take as much of the grafted trees as I want. I told him I just want a couple to give the rest away to his friends and the teachers he works with. He says to take more soon because he doesn't know if there'll be any next time I visit. I asked why. And he tells me over the 3 last weeks they have stolen over a 100 grafted mangoes, dozens at a time, probably coming over the neighbor's wall. He had around 150 Keitts since that's what everyone wants because it's grown commercially here, and now he's down to 22.

This guy doesn't even sell his trees, he just gives them away and grows them for the love of the art. Makes my blood boil that there's a selfless Johnny Appleseed type character out there doing good, and he's paid back with his kindness to the world by having the fruit of his efforts stolen by scumbags.

I planted a small 8" seedling mamey sapote last April. It not only has grown pretty fast it seems pretty cold hardy as well.

It got down to about 27 degrees here. I think it killed a 3 year old coco cream mango and a 3 year old Alano sapodilla. All the guavas have defoiliated, even some of my white sapotes got some burn on top. The cold also completely defoiliated all my guamuchil trees which I thought were supposed to be tough.

But my mamey sapote seems to have dealt with the cold pretty well considering.

In the photo(forgive the grass and foilage debris, it's in an unkept portion of the ranch). The mango seedling next to it took some damage, the bananas next to it are in really bad shape, I think some are dead, there's even a little Suriname Cherry if you can spot it that's completely defoiliated but the mamey roughed it out

We have a transportation company and one of our clients who manages a nursery specializing in citrus asked me where he could get up to 10,000 turpentine seeds from Florida, and what ballpark cost he was looking at. I mentioned to him I thought manilla mango seeds work better in California and to call LaVerne nursery to see if they might be feeling friendly and point in him in the right direction but he seems to want "turpentine" mango seeds from Florida for some reason.

Anyone know where to get that sort of thing in bin/pallet quantities? 

I have noticed that my young subtropicals planted around castor bean plants seem to do better than the others planted around my other shade helper trees, namely moringa and guavas. Their large leaves feel cool to the touch, almost like they've been stuck in a refrigerator.

So, I got out my temp gun and gauged the temperature of leaves of various trees within a 10 foot radius. Here are the results

Banana 107



Guava 108



Feijoa 111



Castor bean 83



Does anyone else notice their cold leaves creating a very nice microclimate for their young tropical trees? Too bad the plant itself is butt ugly. 

Title

PM if you have any of these cuttings for sale

It lasts only a month here in the states. And the Coachella Valley is cranking them out now in week 2. I don't really care for medjools(we used to have battles throwing them at each other when we were kids), unless they are really dry but I LOVE fresh barhis!

Landscaping company dumped about 20 loads so far of woodchips at our ranch. The farmers that rent the back plan to work it into their field and "pave" the sideroad. The wood chips look really nice, hardly any dirt or leaves, so I was thinking of mulching some of my trees with it. But it looks like the chips are mostly from tamarisk trees, salt cedars.

Is the wood from these trees salty, like their name suggests? I know mangoes are salt sensitive, so it's probably a bad idea to use the mulch for them right? Would you use tamarisk mulch on either guavas or bananas? How about if I let it age a few months in the 100 degree heat, would that affect the salinity?

It stays between 105-115 degrees all day here during the summer and my young trees that do not have an obstacle blocking them from western sun exposure have a hard time without protection. I have a bunch of black 60% Agfabric shade material that I wrap around stakes to protect them but it's a battle with dry winds keeping them up and repairing tears.

 I also have a bunch of these Agfabric frost protection bags I never used this winter, and I got to thinking of these migrant worker women I saw working in the fields last summer in the brutal heat. They all had hoodie sweaters on. So I figure these frost protection bags might work great protecting trees from the intense heat here, and since they are bags with draw strings, they would hold up great against the winds.

What do you guys think? Would they work in the summer, or would they do the opposite and overheat the tree because they are not as porous as regular shading material?

A couple of years ago I sowed quite a few tropical fruit tree seeds. A year later, I sowed all the seeds that didn't germinate in an unused plot, plus some misc tropical fruit tree seeds I didn't want anymore as well as some samples that sellers sometimes include.

Of the stuff that popped up, I kept a few, and gave most away but there are 2 I don't recognize. The first one in the ground, I'm pretty sure is not a fruit tree. The second in the container I'm not so sure. I didn't protect either one from the cold and neither lost leaves, but the one in the container has yellowed just a bit.

Any clue?

A friend gave me a few mango scions to experiment with for my first mango grafting attempt. So I have a question about where I should place these containerized, small 30" trees after i graft them. Outside in shade with 85-90 daytime temps/45-50 nighttime. Or under my LED grow lamps inside my house with 70-85 under lamp temps.

I have a few Cherimoya and Soursop seedlings about the same size under the LED lamp right now, and they seem to thrive under the LED lamp much more than the ones outside, but I can move them until I buy another lamp.

Some dry brush on the neighbor's property caught fire yesterday and the smoke along with the heat and wind, blew right onto my plants. So far everything looks good except for my tomato plants and one of the cartons full of cherimoya seedlings that I had sitting on a rack (luckily I had placed the rest somewhere else). The smoke didn't kill them but it did kill all the top growth. My question is, will this damage affect their growth and possibly stunt them as they grow?

I have 4 cartons of these seedlings I grew and was curious to see which ones, if any, would thrive in our 110-120 degree summers. I grew extras for little tragedies such as this. So I will be putting a lot more effort into growing them in the next few months/years, but if some are going to be stunted perhaps it would be better to cut my losses now and start a new batch? Or I suppose use them as rootstock to graft onto?

What would you do with them?