The Tropical Fruit Forum

I do so unintentionally    Most of my tropicals are in my grow room, but I have some coffee plants and the like in my living room, and in the winter I break out grow lights for them since no meaningful light comes in from the windows.  So they get lit up in red and purple and white from different angles. 

Just thought of another way to possibly catch thieves if you don't have any cameras: look for any neighbors on the street who own a Tesla and have it parked outside. Teslas have a feature called "Sentry Mode", which uses the car's autopilot cameras as security cameras if someone trips them. It's possible that the perps might have triggered Sentry Mode either on the way in or the way out.

(If the owner of the car thinks it might have been triggered but they deleted the video, deleted files can still be recovered off of USB sticks if they haven't been overwritten yet)

I'd be tempted to saboutage some.  Inject capsaicin oil into say 5-10% of fruits, the most appealing / accessible ones.  Keep careful track of which ones you did it with so you don't eat them yourself.

Thieves should learn the lesson pretty quickly. 

Honestly, saboutaged bait is a pretty good tactic.  I once had thieves steal a toolbox and two full cans of gasoline (back before I went electric).  So I left out several additional gas cans, which were all promptly stolen as well.  And to be fair, they did contain gasoline.... on the top.  Anyone who smelled it or poured off a little would see gasoline, no question.  But it was only half the liquid in the cans, flowing atop a denser layer of... concentrated hydrochloric acid.  Which eats steel 

The only downside is you never get to see the thieves faces when they realize how badly they screwed up. 

Culprit discovered (just got another one, more on the way): Eugenia reinwardtiana / Cedar Bay Cherry. 

Remarkable how much it tastes like plum. Only real criticism is I'd like a better flesh to seed ratio.

I've never tried it for that. I tried it to see if I could induce partial sex reversal in papayuelo. Didn't work - and I ultimately went up to levels that were causing all the leaves to come out deformed.

The town is at 1134m altitude. Given the normal atmospheric lapse rate, if these trees extend upwards of 2000m, up there you could cut about 9°C off of those temperatures.  So in extreme years, it's possible the highest trees could face frost.

Sign me up for 8 seeds    Do I just go ahead and send $29 to raulglezruiz@gmail.com with my address in the comments, then?

ED: I went ahead and assumed that the above was correct and sent the money.

Awesome - hope I make the list!  How do the size, flesh:seed ratio, and taste compare to the others?

It looks very much like pitanga. If you're in Florida or an area that has lots of these, birds can carry them around. Could've dropped overhead or something potentially.

Hehe, I'm in Iceland. These plants live in a room that never sees the sun - not even through a window.  The only bird that could possibly have access to them is a tame amazon parrot 

So... I'm baffled. While caring for my plants, I found this fruit on the ground. It had been stepped on and was highly mangled, so I don't know what it originally was.  But some key characteristics can be seen - the four-pointed puckered shape at the bottom, red skin, soft / juicy orange flesh, and a single large round seed. There was enough of the flesh left unmangled for me to try it - it tasted very much like plum.




My first thought was strawberry guava. It was right next to a plant that (at least according to my records, and certainly by appearance) is strawberry guava, and it's been blooming a lot recently for the first time. I hadn't seen any fruit on it, but another one of my strawberry guavas has its first immature green fruit on it (tiny little plant, I'm amazed that it can hold fruit!).  But beyond the flesh being wrong, strawberry guava has small seeds, not a single large one.

The single large seed makes me think eugenia. Indeed, there was also a rainforest plum right next to it. But it's another tiny, tiny little juvenile plant, maybe 15cm tall, and I hadn't seen it bloom. Certainly doesn't look like a ripe rainforest plum.  But maybe half ripe?

My acerola is fruiting, and it overhangs a bunch of other plants, and the fruit could roll.  But that certainly doesn't look like acerola, esp. since acerola has three irregular seeds per fruit.

There's so many other plants on overhanging shelves or overhanging or growing around generally around the room, but apart from some capsicums, none have visibly flowered or fruited, and most are varieties that one can rule right out, like cocona, garcinias, jackfruit, lychee, passiflora, palms, mangoes, coffee, tamarind, physalis, mamey, annonas, citrus, and on and on and on (it'd take some time to compile an exhaustive list). 

(There's no possibility that this was some sort of supermarket fruit, as I haven't been to the supermarket since March    ).

Thoughts?

You can figure out the pH with those strips by taking a sample, diluting it, retesting, diluting, etc until you're no longer under your pH=6,6 limit.

Like I said, it takes *tiny* amounts. 

I've bought seeds from Maryoto too before. Not only did they arrive alive, they arrived so alive that they had grown a tangle of roots around each other   (it's tough to ship to Iceland, takes a long time!).  Sadly none survived transplant (suboptimal environment, must try again at some point), but everything on Maryoto's end was top notch.

Doesn't that mean years of waiting and lots of space to find out whether you lucked out?