The Tropical Fruit Forum

I don't think it's citron.

3/4 lemon 1/8 grapefruit (or less likely pommelo), 1/8 tangerine seems consistent with the flavor, appearance etc.

Zone 10? Red banana though box it in somehow so it can't spread too much (like now around it, put on side of house or some barrier). Slowly over time they spread and eventually every where years later. I never saw honey suckle in Florida.

I don't know about the heritage variety. We had raspberries and blackberries in Florida. Raspberry does worse than blackberry and some varieties are more heat tolerant than others but generally speaking they survive heat and will even produce berries but they grow better in cooler climates. I doubt that it would die.

Florida is Jurassic Park type of insect swarms but I have seldom seen them on citrus other than that one caterpillar that feeds on citrus which you can easily kill by hand. Citrus greening is the only real issue which there is no cure other than the netting they invented. Sometimes black mildew on leaves from humidity which doesn't harm the plant other than blocking sunlight needs cleaned off. I did get tiny slugs eating sap in my container citrus up north. The ants would probably kill them in Florida.

Citrus is super easy to grow everyone is over complicating it.

In terms of ordering a box of honeybells or citrus it was always high but like $25 for a box of 15 or 20. Now it's $100. It's outrageous. Same with road side oranges. Used to be cheap as dirt now super high if you can find them. Usually they are passing California oranges off on the side of the road. Maybe $12 wholesale. If you have a good tree you can make some money selling them mail order.

The Florida fruits are just super juicy compared to everywhere else. Second best is Brazil. Cali and Texas are dry fruits though people on here before said how good California oranges are. People pay for Florida oranges because they are the best. Well used to be before greening.

But money is an issue because Florida land is going up. They sell their land which becomes houses. Or switching to peaches. There's less groves than there used to be but still a lot. The answer are new citrus breeds that are disease resistant and have good fruit.

Just buy scrub jay land and grow your garden on it if you are willing to travel to harvest it.

I'm in Charlotte county. This place is not only not what it was ten years ago, it's not what it was two years ago. We had a massive influx of new residents during COVID. Real estate prices and over population is out of control. Many working people who lived here their whole lives are moving out and I will too.

If you go east of punta Gorda toward arcadia it's ok. Poor people are spilling out of port Charlotte into that area along with massive Hispanic immigration but not nearly as bad as the coastal areas.

There's a lot of woods there but you'll have non stop planes buzzing over head, lots of drug smuggling and dope heads and it's still over priced for what you are getting. If you absolutely must live in south Florida I guess it's as good a choice as any.

This is the border zone for mangos, coconut etc. Sometimes you can get them surving if you get lucky with warm winters until they are big. Fort Myers is where mango, coconut growing starts in full.

Naples is also an over crowded nightmare where you need to be a millionaire to buy land.

A tiny house in port Charlotte on a less than quarter acre lot which cost $80,000 in the year 2000 is over $300,000 now and good luck finding a house for sale because there's more people here than real estate.

You might want to grow multiple seeds from the hybrid. I would expect if you grow enough of them, at least one of them should result in elimination of the unsavory poncirus taste. That is assuming that the genes behave as normal dominant/recessive pairs. I believe how gene expression works in citrus is a little more complicated.

Let B represent bad taste, and b represent lack of bad taste.
Also let C represent cold hardiness and c represent lack of cold hardiness. B is dominant over b which is recessive.

the first cross was the poncirus with the pure pomelo
BB CC x bb cc = Bb Cc

next you obtained a zygotic seed from the resulting previous hybrid
Bb Cc x Bb Cc =

these are the statistical probabilities:
BB CC
BB Cc
BB cC
BB cc
Bb CC
Bb Cc
Bb cC
Bb cc
bB CC
bB Cc
bB cC
bB cc
bb CC
bb Cc
bb cC
bb cc

only the last 4 possibilities will not have the bad poncirus taste. 4 out of 12 is a 1 in 4 probability. Out of that 1 in 4, 1 in 4 will not really have any cold hardiness. Half will have moderate cold hardiness, like the hybrid parent, and the remaining 1 out of 4 will have superior cold hardiness, better than the parent. That means there will be a 1 out of 16 chance the offspring (assuming they are all zygotic) will both lack a bad taste and also be more cold hardy than the first generation hybrid.
This is probably oversimplified, of course.

what you have now would probably be more like a Bb CC type.

I apologize for hijacking your thread if theory is not what you wanted the discussion to focus on.

Probably similar to grapes. You just get less native flavors each time it's crossed with non native. It takes many generations to breed out those flavors. The number of hybrids with significant native ancestry like 30-50% but without native flavors are only a handful even after many generations of selective breeding and those are used over and over again in further breeding. But I like native flavors but they are bred out for wine.

Cross valentine with one of the better poncirus x orange you might have something good. But most people here want to maintain a high level of poncirus so they can grow it in Pennsylvania or Germany. I'm more interested in greening resistance and being slightly more cold tolerant like a grapefruit or pommelo.

The bell shape (tip) is usually found in hybrids like a grapefruit x mandarin.

So it has normal leaves? The wild orange with a verbslight trifoliate taste has normal leaves but due to taste I think it's a trifoliate poncirus hybrid.

Get some corms whole in the Philippines looks like a good variety.