The Tropical Fruit Forum

I've wanted to try growing chironjas for a long time -- now my wife and I are spending some months at her farm in Thailand, and I'll be able to take care of seeds.  If anyone is growing this plant, and feels up to mailing me 10-15 seeds, I'd be happy to repay them with money, traded seeds, or both.

We'll be there in about a month.  PM me if this might be a possibility for you.

Jackfruit

And I'm not sure I'd call avocado a 'vegetable style' fruit -- it's not sweet, but that doesn't mean it's eaten unripe or in a crunchy state. 

How does Z4 compare to Z2? 

It sounds like the abiu is being developed extremely rapidly, in Australia.

OK, this is my situation -- for the past year I've been ordering seeds and having them sent to my Thai in-laws to plant.  Because of the state of the Thai mail system, and the fact that some were sent express and some were sent regular, and my in-laws don't read English and would just plant them without bothering to tell me, I have no knowledge at all of what has actually arrived.  These are the possibilities:

1)  tree tomato
2)  abiu
3)  Rollinia
4)  custard apple (red variety)
5)  cupuassu
6)  black sapote
7)  green sapote

Before I go back I'm going to google images of seedlings of these to try and figure out which is which -- my question is this, are there any here that are going to be tricky to tell apart?  I have no talent at all at plant identification, and am just throwing this out for anyone who wants to comment . . .  To me a lot of tropical plants look pretty similar . . . 

There are very few popular fruits that have not been heavily modified, often past recognition -- non-domesticated bananas, for example, are pretty different from what we think of as a banana.  Any wild fruits of Africa would likely be far inferior to the ones that humans have developed in the past few thousand years. 

The rain forest is probably not the original human habitat either, we are more adapted for mixed savanna.  Hunter-gatherer populations in the rain forest are very small, most humans living in that environment depend on agriculture, sometimes in the form of tropical horticulture, sometimes as slash-and-burn grain crops. 

There's a decent chance that nuts were more important to early humans than they are today -- if you want to go to Southern Africa and feast on the mogongo nut (or something like that) there's a chance that you're eating an early staple. 

Are all these abiu cultivars grown from seed, or are they grafted?

It came from a web site that is usually devoted to Thai pop stars, gruesome murders, and deformities -- I've got a feeling that it was just put up there as some kind of freak show shot, not a new cultivar or anything.  My wife says the story says they are unknown in Thailand, and since no one who reads that site is a horticulturalist, no big deal.  No idea what's with the durian, or why the two most annoying newscasters in Thailand would be talking about it.

Anyone know anything about the yellow-fleshed rambutan my wife found a picture of in Kanchanaburi?

Basic jabo question -- is there any reason not to try and jam two or three species of jaboticaba together into a 2+ acre plot?  Will they all hybridize with each other and produce useless seeds?  Or do they remain distinct?  I'd like to use some of the seeds from mature trees to plant larger numbers elsewhere.

In Uganda they believe that when the root of a jackfruit touches the house, the owner will die.

Have you heard from anyone how they break down?  A lot of reviews talk about how they're 'degradable' but don't actually say 'biodegradable' . . . 

I just want to say that on the basis of this thread I ordered the above mattock from Amazon and sent it to my father-in-law in rural Thailand (where most digging tools are either steel hoes that people carve the handles for themselves, or cheap stamped shit from China).  He absolutely loves it, when he opened up the package he said it would last for three generations, and he's out showing it around the village.  I think it's going to be extremely useful, he's got some people building little huts in a temple where they have to do a lot of digging in scrub forest.  Anyway, I'd like to thank LivingParadise for the suggestion.

The part about peat moss increasing drainage in heavy soil caught my eye -- does it have any special properties in this regard, or would something like straw have the same effect?

[later addition] I did some reading online, it looks like you have to be careful about using peat moss in extremely heavy soil, in wet climates; it can have the effect of increasing water absorption.  Apparently straw works pretty well, as long as you have enough nitrogen in the soil to make sure it rots.