The Tropical Fruit Forum

Anyone have a forecast from what they're seeing now as to the peak of the season this year? I am considering a trip out to FL again, was a blast last year but was at the tail end. Don't want to miss it this year if it's truly as epic as y'all are saying.

Mid-June in West Palm Beach.

Quote from: Squam256 on January 03, 2023, 01:37:16 PM

I currently have 5 grades for ease of flowering for mango in south Florida:. A few examples provided with each category. Some are disputable as to which group they belong but this is a rough projection based on recent past behavior. Stem age plays a major role as well, and I can’t emphasize enough that you want to get your pruning done before the end of August here to avoid late flushes of growth, and to avoid over feeding the trees to lessen the likelihood of that as well.

Grade 1/Very Easy : These are precocious, and frequently blooming before the New Year regardless of what kind of weather we see. Rosigold, Edward, Dwarf Hawaiian, Rosa

/Grade 2/Easy : these can achieve decent blooms off less than a week below 60F depending on the age of their stems. A solid week will make most of them achieve majority blooms.
Angie, Pickering, Ah Ping, Jean Ellen, Ice Cream, Super Julie

Grade 3/ Medium some bloom after a week or less but not majority of canopy depending on stem age. 10 days with lows below 60F is typically enough to get a majority bloom.
Haden, Bailey’s Marvel, Glenn, most Thai mangos and most old Florida varieties

Grade 4/ Difficult Will flower inconsistently unless they receive multi-week cold fronts. Usually very unprecocious. Sweet Tart, Alphonso, Mulgoba, Peach Cobbler, Bombay

Grade 5/ Extremely Difficult/ Near Impossible These likely require 2+ weeks *untinterupted* lows in the 50s/40s plus optimal stem age and 6+ years of total tree maturity to achieve full blooms here(growth flush needs to be hardened off before end of August and cold front must be January or later). In reality, Most winters here they’ll either fail to bloom completely or just throw a couple panicles here or there. Sindhri, Dasheri, Gilas, Anything from northern India or Pakistan.




Groups 3 and 4 are the problem for people in Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade, and maybe even the Treasure Coast now too. Due to a lot of trees in the nursery trade being in those categories.

On the other hand, trees in group 4 and 5 should do well in California and some group 4 maybe central /West Florida

Which grade would Sonpari fall into. Contemplating on ordering some budwood to graft onto my two remaining warm winter bloom hesitant trees 🙂
I know two seasons doesn't make a trend but on the northwest side of those trees they seem to be dormant and hesitant to Bloom so to hedge my bet I may graft a few scions of a different variety but I'm very glad that John51 started this thread. His timing is impeccable

I would probably put Sonpari in group 3.

Quote from: Squam256 on March 15, 2023, 06:38:26 PM

Found two ripe Carries today and ate one of them.

.... and???

Was it delicious??

Considering you hadnt seen rain in weeks I am assuming it was, but you have to tell.

Yes, way better than I was expecting for a March Carrie.




A good flavor change up from the Rosigolds and Edwards which have both been really good as well.

Also found a ripe O-15 today and have some Rosas and Dwarf Hawaiian that are pretty close.

We do not produce grafted or seedling Coconut Cream trees, and don’t distribute the budwood either. There are nurseries in south Florida that do without license, however.

From what I remember, “Candy Corn” was one of the random seedlings growing along the perimeter path at the nursery (not a number from Gary’s breeding project). If it’s the mango I’m thinking of, it had an Indochinese hybrid type flavor and was good quality.

I’m very skeptical of reports on its eating quality that were based on fruit that was being harvested way too green. This is reminiscent of when people were asking what the big deal was about some of the program hybrids that were regularly being picked weeks before they should have been.

Ours is Flowering/setting fruit now so we’ll see if we get anything from it this cycle and give it a fair eval.

We have 3 Crème Brûlée trees.

The largest is a topwork and has been fruiting for a while.

Two of them are grafted to experimental dwarfing rootstock that has worked “too well”. One of the 2 is an an unhealthy runt that I really should remove. The other has done better and has fruited a couple times.

The topwork has been a healthy low-to-moderate vigor tree but isn’t in the best position for growth. It had previously been an Eldon tree, but when bacterial black spot proved to be too much of a problem for it, I topworked it into Creme Brûlée around 2016. Some of The neighboring trees were vigorous growers (a Cac and an ST Maui)  and there’s also a shade house near to its south.

It flowers pretty easily here. Like some of the other Edward progeny it can have issues with producing disproportionate male flowers but it always sets some fruit. The fruit stay green until mature and then turn dull yellow when they ripen here. In interior areas I imagine they would probably stay green most of the time. It doesn’t get bacterial spot at all, but I could see anthracnose being a problem if conditions are humid enough. It’s flowering now so maybe after it’s done setting it’s crop I can remember to take a picture.

As far as ripening is concerned, we had some issues the first couple crops with softnose/uneven ripening which made me reluctant to sell the fruit to people, but that seems to have gone away the last several years and we’ve sold some of the fruit in recent years with strong positive reports. Probably just needs to be harvested mature green.

Back When I collected the budwood I remember Gary Zill telling me that the original tree had only fruited like 2 times in 14 years or something . But I think It may have fruited more frequently since that time so they finally produced some trees for the public.

The trees have been available long enough that I would have expected some reports from consumers by now, but this is true of some of the other Zill varieties that you hear almost nothing about from backyarders/small growers.

It would be nice to see some feedback because I regard Creme Brûlée as one of the finest flavored members of the Indian/West Indian group. Perhaps even the best of it.

My Pickering gave us 90 delicious mangoes last summer.  This season, however, looks like a bust.  Mid-February and one pannicle has popped up while the rest of the tree appears dormant.    Why??   

Most of our Pickering trees have fairly complete blooms but there are a couple that have weak partial blooms.

As far as the why, you can blame the weak winter. Warm winters like this reduce the likelihood of trees flowering, particularly if their stem tips haven’t had a lot of time to mature. This isn’t uncommon with trees that had large crops the prior year and flushed growth later in the year consequently.

Would someone with Excalibur mamey sapote be so kind as to upload a photo of a cross-sectioned fruit? Doesn't seem to be a single photo viewable anywhere.

This is what the fruit looks like whole:


I don’t have a photo of what it looks like cut open, but this photo of a Lorito fruit is representative of the color that I remember, perhaps just a slightly brighter shade if we were to split hairs:

Here’s a pic of one of the Carries a couple seasons ago:

Since this thread contains most of the info about this cultivar on these boards, I thought I'd ask the question here.

Anyone ever checked to see if the seed is mono or poly?

They’re monoembryonic and make nice rootstock.

Bump for tonight. Will be doing a Q&A after the presentation.

Can you make this like one of those Fathom Events? Instead of showing Opera at the movie theaters, we could stream your event?

JK, I hate my state

Not familiar with Fathom.
Anytime I do a paid talk for a group or club I leave it up to them as far as sharing the content. Since they obviously want to incentivize people to join/attend their meetings.

But the stuff I do with Fruitful Trees and Paul Nison gets posted on YouTube. We’ll probably do at least one Q&A stream about mangos before the season and I’ll try to remember post about it beforehand on here.

Besides Keitt and Lemon Zest, other highly susceptible varieties include:

Venus
Kent
Hatcher
Mallika
Okrung
Haden
Palmer
Golden Queen/ Kiew Yai
East Indian
Ice Cream
Rapoza
Manzanillo
Springfels
Eldon
Totapuri
Super Julie
Ah Ping
Diplomatico
Hindi Bessenara/Vellai Colomban
Cushman
Oro
Brooks
Wise
Bizcochuelo

And others