The Tropical Fruit Forum

I took a picture this morning.
I'm not sure how big the fruit on brasiliensis get but I have quite a few that are around 1 inch in diameter.
2 of my 5 trees are going crazy now.

From the pictures I've seen of Brasiliensis they looked to be abour 3-4 inches

If you want larger fruits I would suggest Garcinia Brasiliensis.

Intermedia fruit size is pretty trivial on every plant I've seen.

I'll agree with those who said canistel. While they aren't all dry, they do all taste "off" and the dry ones are like eating an old dried out hard boiled egg yolk. A friend of mine in Miami tried to convince me there are good ones and let me try one of his favorites when I was visiting a few years ago (I don't remember the cultivar), and it still was gross tasting to me. I have had good smoothies that mix it with other things.

Black sapote, on the other hand, is one of my favorite fruits, so I'm surprised to see so much hate here. I like to just eat it with a spoon when properly ripened, but it's also good in a smoothie even when not perfectly ripe. I'm eventually hoping to try to hybridize it with D. texana, which at least has the same chromosome count so might be able to cross (I couldn't find any research papers where it was attempted, though). I have a bunch of texana seedlings I'm planning to trial outside here, and plan to add a grafted black sapote to my greenhouse in a year or so.

You should try "Ross Sapote" before writing off canistel. The ones I've had were like a really good mamey, and I haven't had a mamey that I liked yet.

Mammee apple makes a good jam with some cinnamon and nutmeg

Theres a feral ivy gourd plant out back I'm waiting for fruit to cook with too

FWIW, there is decent "yellow mangosteen" out there.

Theres a 100+ foot tree at the Hilo arboretum here that has good fruits.

The flesh on the inside is sweet/sour, closer to the rind is edible but somewhat acrid.

Always decorticate or at least scarify seeds with heavy shells.

We use a vise grips for decortication to prevent overapplication of force that can damage the seed itself.

We place the seed in between the teeth of the pliers then turn the screw down on it until there is resistance.

For less durable seeds you can just keep turning the screw, or squeeze it by the handle to crack it.

I usually take the entire seed coat off if it is possible.

For canistel seed it cuts germination down to about a month, when it can take over a year without decortication.

We have a variegated Cara Cara from Plant it Hawaii

Using correct common names or better yet latin names is all we have to make sure we are are talking about the same species . There is only 1 mangosteen , the others have their own common names and species names.
Fff has the couple Garcinia growing that do okay in a snap freeze. There are probably 100 + different Garcinia cultivars to grow and a couple are suitable for florida and pretty much none are suitable for anywhere else in the lower 48 as CA is too cold and not humid enough .
Mis identification can prevail for many years and is a huge pet peeve and turn off for many.

As much as this question comes up the answer is always the same, not really.

Seems like this argument is moot when we can and should just use the binomial, imo.

Pretty sure its the rule here that it needs to be in the post title anyway, though not sure if thats applied in the discussion forums.

My mom will call plants "apple" if its in the common name (mountain apple, mammee apple)

Drives me nuts

I’m not sure why people have started attaching “mangosteen” to every Garcinia. Power of association?

No one is being picky by stating this fact: Garcinia mangostana is the one and only Mangosteen.

People do what they want with very little rhyme or reason. Personally I'd say that if a plant is colloquially referred to as (blank) mangosteen, then it is "a mangosteen" for the people who refer to it as such.

This is the entire reason why taxonomy exists to begin with.

There's no reason to go the dogmatic route: "A mangosteen IS a mangosteen"

Just use the binomial

FWIW, I also call it "purple mangosteen" sometimes, like tru. Not really seeing the point of admonishing people for doing so, especially when any confusion can be cleared up with the binomial.

On the flip, just calling garcinia mangostana "mangosteen" may be confusing for the unsophisticated folks who apply "mangosteen" to other species.

Surely you’ll see it if you’ll be all over Oahu. It is a weed tree in Hawaii, not worthy of propogation by a nursery.

I never found the edible cecropia fruit here (Puna area), we had a cecropia tree in the back that I cut down but the fruits were woody and not edible.

Maybe the edible ones are around but I haven't seen them, or maybe we just picked at the wrong time

I had some G. Dulcis at the Hilo Arboretum today and it was pretty good. Some mango flavor and not overly sour, but for the flesh near the rind. I'm interested in how to tell Dulcis apart from xanthochymus because I have some seedlings I need to ID. The leaves look a bit different but there wasn't a xanthochymus there to compare to. The tree was loaded though. We almost had a couple fruits splat on our heads.

Looks like spondias dulcis

Maybe try a low pressure aeroponic cloner. You can make one with a 5 gallon bucket, a pump, some poly tubing, hole saw, sprayers, net cups and neoprene collars.


Here's a good example but I made a circle of poly tubing with a riser and some tees and stuck a couple sprayers on the outside part of it. I cut off the bottom of the net cups instead of shoving the neoprene in the holes like the guy does in the video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELfNrq1iq6E

Edit: nearpow makes decent infinite repeat timers for the spraying interval. I think we did 10 seconds on and 5 minutes off. You can do interval timing with a tasmota smart switch as well but I dont remember the command to set it.