The Tropical Fruit Forum

There are a few neglected mangoes in my surrounding hood. Some are 25 feet tall and wide and we’re planted right up against the houses and surrounded with Concrete. The odd part is they don’t look like any of them get watered regularly yet they are thriving and full of mangoes. Things that make you go hmmm.

Rare to find outstanding *anything* at the grocery store, so that's a win. I have some yellow type ones that have a hint of papaya in them at the ranch.

I just bought some fruits from Etsy so I can get the seeds to germinate and grow some seedlings. Does anyone know how to tell when the fruit is fully ripe to take out the seeds?

I didn't know the fruit comes in many different colors from the same tree.

When the pistils of S. citrullifolium were pollinated with the pollen grains of S. aggregatum, the fruits became smaller than those of the parents and contained many uufilled seeds but no filled ones. The colour they assumed when ripe was intermediate of the fruits of their parents.

Great story.  Absolutely, passion fruit ripening over the summer are sweeter and more flavorful than those that ripen over the winter.  Just ate a winter/spring ripened passion fruit today and it was sour as hell.

It looks good. Yes, taste will improve in a few more years. Bring me some cuttings to plant.

Quote from: K-Rimes on April 29, 2025, 08:55:13 PM

This tends to happen to people who don't prune at all. I've been offering fruit tree services around town and I cannot tell you how many people recoil at the thought of having me prune their trees, sometimes really hard, to get them back down to appropriate heights. If you are regularly pruning, you can really reduce this happening. Eventually as you see now, the trees are way too big and would need to be chainsawed down and re-established to get them right again.

I also note a lot of owners just get tired of the novelty of their fruits and stop paying attention to the  trees. First few years they're canning, eating, and sharing all that fruit then they just kind of get used to it and eat a few fruits a year and let the rest go to waste. This is why it is extremely important to only plant HITTERS. The best of the best. The fruits you know you'll never get tired of, and you'll be much more inclined to take care of the tree long term. 

I would only recommend dwarf cultivars, dwarf rootstocks, and not planting multiples of the same thing.

I also cannot express how important it is to shape trees low when they are young.  People buy an 8' tall tree with 6' of vertical trunk thinking aha! I got the BEST one at the nursery because it is the TALLEST! I then go ahead and stump their tree below my knee, much to their concern. When the tree comes back next year, or in Spring, it shoots off the canopy down low, and it makes an enormous difference to the tree's size long term.

The only reason I've learned all this is because I've made a ton of mistakes over the years in allowing trees to become large, or by not setting their shape and being aggressive enough with them when they are young. I am brutal now.

There is also a book, I think it's "Grow a Little Fruit Tree" that is helpful for a lot of people.

I'm not sure you "made mistakes" but this stuff is a little more advanced, higher-tier garden care that a lot of people learn "later on," this hobby has so many facets, often contradictory information,  and people start out worrying more about soil and keeping their stuff alive whereas the long-term shape of the tree is a more secondary concern when you're afraid of losing everything you got to begin with! It's just that the problem is you learn it too late after the stuff you started with gets too big!

Plant the big hitters, graft onto them the secondaries, novelty, or stuff you're unsure about.  Me, my backyard is mostly "novelties" for my area but things I will propagate like feijoa that nobody has heard of, pawpaw, asian persimmon, fig, etc, the good stuff that America's confused culture sort of forgets about (it's an atrocity a unique native fruit like pawpaw is unknown to most Americans).  Of course I live on the 7b/8a cusp which lets me grow some of these more fascinating/uncommon fruits and some wiggle room to zone push.

Here's a (referral-free) link to the book as I found it on Amazon.

I think a lot of this phenomenon is simply cultural.  Americans are trained from a young age to view grocery store chains as the "appropriate" place food comes from. Many people are confused and alarmed by the mere act of eating fruit from a wild tree! I would not be surprised if these people with loaded fruit trees are still buying that fruit from the grocery store out of """convenience""". A lot of people will buy a new house with a fruit tree then neglect it because eating fruit "from outside" feels wrong or because the tree is too mysterious or scary for them.

Fortunately/unfortunately I think this attitude will be on the wayside as prices rise and inflation continues to hit, people will have to be more clever with their money.  Without trying to be political I think anyone watching the USA over the past few decades would realize that the "Pax Americana" is ending; the idea of everyone having a "chicken in every pot, a car in every garage" has already ended and you're even considered spoiled to now ask so much.  If global trends continue people will start paying more attention to their plants. They'll have to.

Im loving the foliage on there . Never seen a psidium like that