The Tropical Fruit Forum

I've seen examples of fuzzy kiwi grown in "tree form" where it is trained up a single tall post and then allowed to hang down, similar to the way dragonfruit is usually grown commercially. I'd guess it requires a fairly diligent pruning regimen.

I don't think it'll do well in pots or kept short, but a single tall pole is a pretty small footprint compared to a whole trellis.

Looks like some combination of root rot and freeze and/or sun damage? What size is the pot? By 2 years from seed I'm usually potting mine up to a minimum of 15 gal or (preferably) planting in the ground. They can be hard to keep happy in a container, especially if it's not big enough.

Can you take a few photos of your leaves, does it look just like the photo I posted ?

I had posted a photo in that thread before:

https://tropicalfruitforum.com/index.php?topic=43492.msg513194#msg513194

The leaves tend to turn sorta fall colors in the fall but mostly don't drop off until spring when the new growth starts. I'm also trying to get some cuttings of it on their own roots this spring.

drymifolia, maybe UCR/CCPP gave you a wrong scion wood. I had that a few times, the fruit didn't look at their data sheet photo. I just purchased their Winters Seedless Lemon a few years ago and the fruits I have been getting isn't the shape of any of my other 8 lemon varieties. I hope it is seedless since last year it had seeds. My seedless Lisbon lemon has no seeds but not this new one, VI -909.

No, I think it looks like the right fruit, and the leaves match. I mean it definitely tasted bad, but just very sour and somewhat bitter, it tasted much better than the few trifoliate fruit I've ventured to lick before.

That was my review about a year ago, the fruit was terrible, I know a few others that grow it and said the same.

Here's the old post, my fruits were fully ripe, orange outside.

https://tropicalfruitforum.com/index.php?topic=43492.msg513242#msg513242

I wonder if it gets worse as it ripens then. Mine was palatable enough that I drank the entire few ounces of juice and I feel like it would make a good sweetened glaze or maybe lemonade. It was bitter, but not more bitter than most grapefruit, and it was sour, but no more than a lime or lemon. No other off flavors to speak of.

I got this one from CCPP a couple years ago and last season I had the first flower (just one) which set a fruit. It got blown off (prematurely, I think) by a wind storm last night.





I had heard from the UC person that it is horrible tasting, but I juiced it and the juice wasn't that terrible. Tasted somewhere on the lemon to grapefruit spectrum, none of that weird trifoliate funk, but you'd have to sweeten it a lot (or hope it gets a lot more sweet when more ripe) before anyone would label it enjoyable.

The seeds have an interesting distinctive reddish patch on the bottom end:



Here's the UC accession description:

https://citrusvariety.ucr.edu/crc3881

2031 is the earliest you can hope to get it legally and they will probably try to keep it under lock and key even longer than the expiration of the patent:

https://patents.google.com/patent/US20130055476P1/en

Tree size, not age, is what triggers a seedling avocado tree to begin flowering. That tree is too small. You'll need to pot it up to a larger pot and try to carefully root prune any girdling roots when you do that. Most avocado seedlings will fruit when they reach about 3 to 5 meters in height, but that's assuming normal healthy branches full of leaves. And some trees never flower.

As far as where to get scionwood in Switzerland, there's a flourishing avocado grove on a lakeside near Locarno, with many grafted varieties and maybe a few seedlings too. Maybe the person organizing that would share scionwood.

Are those seedlings outside with no protection? They are looking pretty good for mid 20s F

I haven't protected any of my in-ground trees yet this winter. Here's a photo from this morning (though it was actually not particularly cold this morning, just snowy):



The largest tree in bottom-right is a seedling of Mexicola Grande, the smaller trees in the background are (left to right) seedlings of Del Rio, Aravaipa, Mexicola, and Royal-Wright (that one is likely R-W x Duke). They've been in the ground for a few years but keep getting knocked back to the soil line when it gets down around 16°F. So far this winter with a low of 25.7°F (and a few other nearly as cold) they have some leaf damage but are otherwise doing well.

I have no idea what I was sold 40 seeds of but the leaves have no anise smell, I know poncho doesn't have smell.

I believe you're confusing Del Rio with Poncho/Pancho. My Poncho has a strong scent, but Del Rio (which I got from Craig Hepworth) has almost no scent. I've started dozens of seedlings of Del Rio and often the seedlings have no scent either but sometimes they do (maybe pollen parent was a variety with more scent, Craig grows many other varieties).

I saw a Facebook post of 29 varieties exposed to 21F the results were pretty surprising.

I'm not on Facebook and don't click on fb links, but if that was Ken in Arizona then I'm in touch with him periodically, and keep in mind that his tree is infected with the sunblotch viroid (ASBVd), which some varieties are much more susceptible to than others, and that might explain some of the unexpected results. Cultivars already weakened by the viroid might show unexpected freeze damage.

Only about 5-10% of the seedlings from cold hardy avocados are similarly cold hardy like the parents. Most of them have damage in the 25-28 degree range. That’s why we graft. I do encourage planting seedlings so we get new varieties.

What is your source for this claim? I've grown many hundreds of hardy seedlings and I'd say their hardiness is a bell curve roughly centered on the parents' hardiness (especially where likely pollen parent is also known).

Yes I plan on using them as rootstock. I know the Florida fruit geek uses poncho. He doesn't ship though and have tried to get in touch with him several times.

Craig uses Del Rio mostly, not Poncho (I don't even know if he grows Poncho). He will not ship trees, but he did ship me a box of seeds in fall 2023, and I had a family member in his area pick up trees from him and send me scionwood a few years ago as well, so that's how I acquired Del Rio.

Brokaw told me a couple years ago that they will never sell ungrafted rootstocks, you have to instead order grafted trees on those rootstocks. I wanted to buy Toro Canyon, though, not the ones you list there. When they said they had to be grafted and ordered 2 years in advance, I asked for a quote for local pickup for 20 trees, Mexicola Grande grafted on Toro Canyon. Here's the email they sent me:

For Mexicola Grande on Toro Canyon that would be a “special order” for California only at 100 trees (3.5 gallon sleeves only- see below for our field trees) minimum. $42.80 each paid in full prior to propagating.

We do not sell ungrafted rootstock or scions as we use all of our rootstock for our production.

Minimum order of $4,280.00 just to get a clonal rootstock that I only really wanted a few trees, so I haven't tried to order from them again.

I've also heard the same about Mentor Grafting being tossed aside as a dead end with no usefulness. At first I was thinking that's not how genetics works but maybe how Epigenetics work. It turns out Horizontal Gene Transfer seems to be very real.
 
I wonder if the consensus only tested this theory on mature plants grafted on Mature Plants? I legit think this is why it's not commonplace, no one does it with Young Hybridized highly plastid Offspring, most are working with mature highly stabilized non-plastid plants. It's very recent these Chinese Researchers have shown there is more to it, the consensus spread is much slower than I realized.

As you look into to, look for scientific papers on Ivan Michurin's work, a lot of the Chinese Researchers have tested & proven his theories.
Report back any cool things you find, I love Learning!

I don't have the time for a deep dive at the moment, but from a lunch break surface skim, I did indeed see discussions of recent Chinese research, though mostly in the context of "look graft hybridization is a thing that can happen," not specifically about it proving anything about mentor grafting helping to enable sexual hybridization, and there have been accusations of falsified data in some of those Chinese studies. I just have a strong suspicion that it is not a practical means to enable sexual hybridization of species that are not otherwise genetically compatible, even if you might get a 1 in a billion lucky gene transfer that fixes the incompatibility.

Since Diploid x tetraploid often forms sterile triploids, what happens if you combine mix Diploid & tetraploid pollen to pollinate the Sterile triploid again? Will it fail to set fruit, make seedless fruit or be sterlie again in the next generation?

Triploids often fail to flower, have flowers incapable of forming fruit, or more rarely form seedless fruit. Because the seed parent is incapable of producing viable offspring, no amount of pollen trickery will fix that problem. I've also been unable to find any research paper about any triploid Diospyros species or hybrid ever being created, so I suspect that diploid x tetraploid is simply entirely incompatible in this genus.

The only way to solve incompatible Chromosome numbers is to have one double so it's an even number? I've heard it's the odd number ploidy that's the hard part for breeders but I'm not sure why?

Odd numbers are problematic because each parent generally donates half their chromosomes to the offspring, so you can't get half of 3 or 5. But it's not entirely that clear-cut, occasionally the odd ploidy gets paired with a mutation that solves that problem by doubling something or fusing something.

Also it seems like higher odd ploidies have fewer problems than lower odd ploidies (some papers discuss nonaploid kaki cultivars and I don't remember any mention of them being sterile). Nonaploid can happen with hexaploid x hexaploid where one of them spontaneously doubles, so maybe some kakis are prone to spontaneous doubling? It would make sense, since the first hexaploid ancestor was probably the product of a spontaneous doubling of one parent's contribution in a tetraploid x tetraploid offspring.

oh my I wasn't expecting pseudo science, just to clarify it's the "Mentor Grafting solves chromosome mis-matches" part that's pseudo science & not the Mentor Grafting Technique itself to overcome other hybridization barriers right? I've never tested it cuz I have no land to try it on :'(
Michurin was able to Make Intergeneric Hybrids that way (Probably had matching Chromosome numbers despite being different genera).
However many Chinese Researchers have been studying michurin's work & it's recently getting proven. I'm sorry I forget not everyone knows about them, them scientist need youtubers spreading the word.

Here's the study,
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30122234/

I have read a lot about the debate over the existence/prevalence of graft hybridization, but that's something entirely different. The vast majority of alleged graft hybrids were in fact chimeras or random bud sports, and there's no real evidence that "mentor grafting" has any real effect, nor any physiological reason it should.

I think the consensus now is that while sometimes DNA and RNA can cross the graft union and cause mutations to occur (graft hybridization), it's not commonplace nor useful as a way to encourage actual sexual hybridization (i.e. via pollination).

I do not watch YouTube, I'm mostly a research paper kind of guy, so I'll dig around some more and see if there's any better example of "mentor grafting" being effective. I am aware that it was used by some breeders, especially before the modern understanding of what grafting does and does not do to the plants involved, but I've mostly seen it discussed as one of those dead-ends that is not worth repeating because that's not how plant biology works.

Thank you for clarifying that Mentor Pollination doesn't solve Chromosome mis-matches (I'm still not sure if they're important to focus on or not cuz a lot of times the hybrid plants figured it out but I wasn't sure why). Perhaps the Persimmon Family is a plant family that is strict about chromosome numbers. Brassicaceae, Poaceae, Zingiberaceae, Asteraceae, Rosaceae and many more are all known for constantly making intergeneric Hybrids, many even with mis-matching Chromosome numbers. Brassica with Raphanus Trianlge comes to mind.

I tried to be as clear as I could but I may have not said it right. The chromosome numbers don't need to match, but they do need to be compatible. For reasons that I don't fully understand, certain ploidy combinations work better than others. Diploid x tetraploid often forms sterile triploids, and diploids almost never can cross with hexaploids, though if they did I guess it would be a pentaploid.

D. kaki persimmons are hexaploid (usually) or nonaploid (rarely), while D. virginiana is split in half, with the northwest portion hexaploid and the southeastern portion tetraploid.

I don't know about nonaploid x diploid compatibility, but diploids are generally not very compatible with hexaploids and produce sterile offspring when crossed with tetraploids, unless you are lucky and get a random polyploid in your diploid population. So if you want to try to breed any diploid species with kaki or virginiana then you will likely have to double the chromosomes of the diploid species first.

Fantastic Blue Persimmon, I've seen those before but only after a long winter as leftovers. And all the fruits on that tree are blue like that?

It was posted on the Growing Fruit forum by someone with lots of knowledge of persimmons who said that tree always has them. I have seen other people discuss it as a genetic thing and not a response to freezing, but it isn't something I've looked deeply into. You can see here it was posted in November, so not at the end of winter:

https://growingfruit.org/t/blue-native-persimmon/40757

Reviving this thread.
I've been trying to grow avocado seeds into trees using the classic toothpick avocado water seed technique. So far, only three have grown roots.
How long do you think it'll take until it starts growing more than just a root?
Thank you for your answer.

Like Coconut Cream says, start them in potting mix or soil, not water. The temperature will play a strong role in the time it takes to sprout. I mostly start Mexican-type seeds in fall in my greenhouse, anywhere from several dozen to a couple hundred each year, and the taproots might emerge in a month or two, but most of them don't sprout topside until late winter or spring.

My suggestion is to start them in Steuwe Deepots if you can get some, or some other similar type of deep/narrow pots or sleeves. I use the D60L pots myself. My avocados started in those are twice as big by the next summer compared to the ones I start in normal 1 gal nursery pots.