Hello All,
First of all, new to the site and a big fan so far so thank you for a great place to discuss and source tropical fruits, on to the meat of the subject-
TL;DR - Does anyone know how to grow these things?
I had the good fortune to visit Trinidad and Tobago (really just Tobago) for a very short period before all of this craziness for a celebration near the end of February-
When traveling I usually like to try the local foods (especially fruits and veggies) and as such while there I bought a bag of fruit on the street from a guy calling it Balata. I found the fruit to be quite delicious- given its many names and confusing taxonomy I would have to put it somewhere between longan and a sapote of some kind, there must have been around 40 fruit in the bag and I was able to get all the seeds sent back to the states in a cleaned fashion-
Fortunately they all arrived well and I have had enough failures in the past with seeds to have the foresight to send seeds to two of my friends. One of them saw 0 germination in about 10 seeds with no special treatment and I haven't had an update from the other.
I planted ~30 seeds (if I recall correctly) in a raised bed I had constructed after I soaked them in hot water for 72h and sanded the seed shell. Since then I have watered them once a day in the morning (quarantine means more time for plants) and patiently watched.
Since I haven't seen much re: germination I began looking around online to find one of these plants and haven't been able to track one down. (other than the potentially different plant currently available on ebay for $125 with shipping) Furthermore I haven't even been able to track down seeds.
I since learned that direct sowing in the ground of many species is not recommended (via tradewindsfruit) and had a bit of a panic. Not being confident whether or not the raised bed was "in the ground" or not I dug as many seeds as I was able to find (9) and noticed that I may have 2 sprouts in seedlings that I was too scared to dig out and try to find the seed.
So the question- Does any one have experience with growing these things from seed? I have heard that they are often grafted on sapodilla trees when I was in Tobago which leads me to believe they should be treated like other Manilkara seeds and don't require special treatment, but have a long erratic germination period.
I have GA3, IAA, IBA, and hormodin as well as a willow tree to generate some natural auxins that I will try as a last resort but for now they are back in a glass of warm water to hydrate.
Thanks in advance for the read and help,
TL;DR - Does anyone know how to grow these things?