The Tropical Fruit Forum

What I'm saying perlite makes plants grow fast due to being light weight. They get more air, roots don't have to work hard to push soil. But if your problem is drainage which perlite is alway advertised as improving drainage. It does to some degree but perlite can get soggy. If your roots are too wet sand is the answer. Cactus and pineapple for example won't grow good no matter how much perlite you use. Even if it's 100% perlite. They need sand in the soil it's the only way to get the drainage they need. Though cactus dirt is usually peat moss and perlite compost just like normal potting soil but with five percent sand maybe ten. If you have really soggy conditions sand is the answer or growing cactus type plants. But for most conditions perlite works.

Could be the dust cloud. Once humidity is approaching the 100% mark it usually rains. Then in the morning it makes dew. Which it will start raining every day in south Florida because the humidity is that high. The only place worse than Florida in the USA is Texas. The humidity may be a bit lower but without the ocean to cool them down it gets hotter than Florida.

Yes. I'm trying to get sundragon because it should be the toughest orange type.

Duncan and Dunstan are very different

They only need watered the first month or two of being planted and in the dry season when it's drought like conditions. But they need some good soil mixed in with the sand so it holds some water and nutrients. Such as dig a big hole and add good soil when planting or add top soil on top because pure sand will stunt the growth of most plants because it won't hold water at all. If it's sand you can water every day and it will be dry the next day.

The really slow growth low vigor is the problem. I get a lot of dwarf types that barely grow at all from grape seed. I get fed up and just pull the up. Curiously both excessive inbreeding and excessive outbreeding cause this. Self pollinated seedlings or similar highly inbred ones. Inbred ones if you cross them again vigor is restored and they turn normal. Or two species of grape that are far apart or complex hybrids some of them come out vigorous some come out stunted depending how the genes mix but that will eventually breed out of them as well and return to normal in a few generations if the abnormal ones are tossed. Could be a mutation but inbreeding and crossbreeding is the most common cause. A plant might pollinate itself. A small percent will have semi normal growth despite being inbred but many will be stunted or weird.

I just don't have the patience to wait years on a slow growing plant.

They did over 1000 crosses and released two cultivars which you can't buy anywhere. It's like their grape program you need special connections to get any of it. Fortunately I got the grape hook up. Would like a finger lime hybrid.

https://australianlimes.ifas.ufl.edu/growing/

I'd like to learn how to graft and just graft onto dwarf meyer lemon primarily because it's the perfect size for containers. I had a dwarf tangerine I ordered also grew like a bush and gets about 10 feet. Only slightly bigger but it was too big for indoors.

With grapes there's such a small percentage of hybrids that survive in Florida without a lot of care so I have grown hundreds of seeds but I have like five good ones or something but space runs out quickly.

The released some stuff that is 1.5-3% vitis arizonica that has a dominant pierce tolerant gene. It took 20 years but they could test if it had the gene at the seedling stage and throw out all of them that didn't have the gene, then cross it again as soon as it was big enough and not really evaluate them until the non vinifera percentage was really low so it wouldn't have any noticable wild traits other than pierce tolerance though some ended up with increased mildew tolerance as well.

Interesting project. They could have simply inserted the gene int existing varieties like chardonnay but people are oppossed to gene altered food and there are regulations. So they did it the old fashioned way. Too bad they didn't use some high quality hybrids that people already grow and give them high pierce tolerance. That way cold tolerance, heat tolerance, fungus tolerance etc from the hybrids added with high pierce tolerance would have been very desirable but they were focused on the California market of getting essentially a European wine grape with pierce tolerance though they require a lot of spray for fungus.

You could then cross them back to Morton or something. They are selling sun dragon in Georgia but it's sold out. No Florida source that I can find. So if it's grown in Georgia cold tolerance must be decent.

With grapes pollen it needs dried out and stored in a freezer to last a year. Even then it's not as good as fresh and after a year goes down to barely viable at all. Fridge helps some. Room temperature won't stay viable for too long. Maybe a few months.

What about sun dragon? 1/8 poncirus and good fruit without off flavors.

Morton would be a good cross sense it's fairly edible. I'd like to see it crossed with sugar bell to get some hlb tolerant crosses. Rio red grapefruit would be good pollen.

Just dig a big hole and fill with potting soil and a little of the native soil when you plant. No bark or mulch. Even when you fertilize it just washes through sand. Sand won't hold nutrients. Then the plant will consume the organic material and it turns back to sand so you have to add compost every year but it helps hold nutrients and water and also root nematodes live in sand. Sand is good for it but the pure sand or nearly pure sand found in Florida sucks for growing things. The secret is massive amounts of compost/potting soil.