The Tropical Fruit Forum

Hey all, fyi for all those container people. I hard purchased these xtra large adjustable plant caddies off Amazon 3 y ago. Seemed strong but must have weakened over time possibly due to sun. The big issue was that with the large wheels it sits quite high off the ground and when one of the sides collapsed the momentum of the 35gallon pot would have caused the whole thing to flip right over if it didn’t happen before my eyes.

How about 50 service birds?

Pneuma, look up krausening. I haven’t bought bran for 4 years. It’s  a beer technique where u use old yeast to inoculate fresh wort. I do the same thing with bokashi. Works best for fruit waste and the lactobacillus chew up the sugars. If u bokashi meat waste you’ll need to add sugar. I often add chocholate milk that is near expiring. I also use buckets with the screw lid, works great. I find the solid dry bokashi waste much easier to break down in my worm bins after I have let it sit for about 1 year. I also add it to my potting mixes, just make sure it’s buried as flys love it.

I use composed food scraps for all my containerized plants. I’m not sure if it would work for seedlings. I am relying on the microbes/insects and fungi to break down my solid and liquid feeds and I don’t think a little pot would work. Also you need to be careful about concentration and ph of your liquid feeds with seedlings. For stuff in the ground I don’t think u have to wait about any of these things. You can go get your composts analyzed to find out what’s in them to see if anything is missing.

This next part gets a bit weird and if you don’t like things that smell bad I would stop reading. I’ve got a pretty good system now, but I have made many error in the past that resulted in purtrid smells and fly infestations that have almost got me kicked out of the house.

For my big plants in containers I have 3 feeding options which use in different settings. Old leaves and coffee grounds are vermicomposted and the liquid run off is then used as a general feed or combined with a bokashi leachate (it’s basically gross kombucha) if I need a feed that is richer (acute flushing or fruiting) or needs a lower ph (soapberry family). For the bokashi I basically ferment fruit waste for potassium and meat scraps for nitrogen. I have separate bins in my house for each of these, and then shred them up and have them break down over time in buckets.

Hey everyone, I have yellow dragon fruit doing well in a container but it’s hard to “pot up” due to the fact that I have a support post bolted to the plastic pot. Do you think I can add a heavy top dress to the pot instead of potting up? I wasn’t sure if root rot is an issue with all the adventitious roots they put out. Does anyone have experience with this?

If these are outdoor then all you usually have to do is stop the ants from farming them with a barrier like tanglefoot at the base of tree (not ideal to put the tanglefoot right on the tree due to asthetics). Provided that you have a healthy ecosystem then wasps, ladybugs, lacewings and parasitic wasps will take care of them. Try to encourage local predatory bugs by planting native flowers and avoiding systemic insecticides.

All my scales and meat bugs get stripped of my infested plants if I take them out in the spring.

Carolyn, I usually just have a cold water line for watering. The water can get really cold in January (40F), but by then I am not having to water much and then would be just using the water from my dehumidifiers. The Venturi would be for the summer, I’ve realized over time that my containerized plants are both unwatered and underfed during the summer months. I think for optimum growth they need daily fertigation.

This fall I’ve been fertigating weekly with a cheap hose end sprayer whose maximum concentration is still more dilute than I like (tap water 110ppm, with the fertigation 200ppm max). But the growth has been remarkable even with it this dilute.

In the past I only used solid organics as a top dressing twice a year. A alfalfa/verimcompost in January (the alfalfa I supposed to break down over a year), and then a mix of composed fruit peels and vermicompost (potassium rich) in may. I was treating them like in growing plants cause there isn’t much info on containerized culture. All the composting people say the liquid byproducts of compost/vermicompost/bolashi should be thrown away.

The big issue with the solid organics was the fruit flies and fungus gnats, it was crazy. There are basically no flies anymore with the dilute fertigation cause all the chemical energy has been sucked out from the decomposition. The secondary benefit is that the plants are even more happy with the regular dilute feed. I think I should have been thinking about things as a hydroponic setup.

I get about 20 gallons a week of deionized water from a dessicant and compressor dehumidifier. The water is warm and usually plentiful enough when the tap water is just above freezing. Electricity is relatively cheap here (vast hydroelectric reserves).

I will let everyone know how it works out.

Andrew, I grew loquat seedlings for 6 years in a 20 gallon pot before it finally flowered. I bought 2 1 gallon cultivars and grew them in a 2 gallon pot for 1 year before they flowered (forced flowering in spring) and them potted them up to a 10 gallon. This is the plant now 18 months after purchase.

Mike, very interesting. What happens with the seeds in the female only plants? Also (best guess) how frequently will they be self fruitful?

Not sure if it’s just me (all plants in containers) but after a couple of years my sugar apple has started to look terrible. If you are going to be able to protect them in the winter why not a soursop, they grow like crazy.

Another neat idea is to use phase change materials (pcm’s). Water barrels work like this, if the water were to freeze they release a huge amount of energy (100x what you can get from a concrete floor) they also use special salt solutions and waxes. You can really nerd out on this stuff, but you start to sound kinda weird… and eventually people don’t want to talk to you anymore, so then you just talk to your plants. I’ll shut up now.

Has anyone gotten soursop to yield fruit in a container? If so what size of plant/pot was required.

It sounds like it seems pointless to try and fruit jackfruit in a container. It’s too bad, it’s such a nice looking tree. I guess it’s next on the chopping block next time I need space.