The Tropical Fruit Forum

Did you get notification of shipping? I had ordered on the 24th, hoping to take them with me as i fly back on the 5th of Dec. I am not home now so not sure if they have been already shipped without notification and already arrived. Messaged both here and in the website but haven’t heard anything yet. I assume it must be very busy with so many orders, but really don’t want them to arrive after i leave as they will just die. I would rather someone else here have them if they are arriving late.

Looks like you can't be added to waitlist for some items.  I would check his site in March or Sept when he posts inventory for sale.

Janet

thank you Janet! I added many things to waitlist, hope they become available this season. Your work on the farm is impressive, we are about to start the similar volume of work, grading slopes with lots of berm type spaces, but small excavators are unavailable here so looking for alternatives - anything other than elbow grease 

Satya,

I hope you will reconsider and start posting in the discussion forum again.  I would really be interested in hearing about how you are developing your new property in Costa Rica.  Your experience, insights, and results contribute to inspiring others to grow food and cultivate beauty.

I'm working on organizing my photos and thoughts for a post on my farm.  This thread is making me question how it will be received, but I guess I'll just have to write it and see.  In the end, I don't really need anyone's approval or validation, but I am open to learning from the experience of other growers.

Janet

Janet, thank you again for your kind words. I really don’t want to rub it in but our experience in Costa Rica would probably not be helpful as we have an unlimited supply of water both from springs (water association keeps its tank on our land and gives us unlimited unmetered access for a small yearly maintenance fee) and a water concession from the river on our property. Rainfall was very nice this rainy season which is coming to an end now, but summers are usually dry here, so we will probably need to irrigate veggie gardens and newly planted trees.


Soil is very fertile acidic and full of worms, and we haven’t even done any applications. The biggest problem is cow grass, as the area has been deforested and turned into pasture about 50 years ago. It's very aggressive and needs lots of elbow grease to remove.


Luckily, cow herders didn’t spend money on fertilizers or weed killers so we are chemical-free, and because it’s steep hilly, there are no DelMonte or Chiquita plantations around that our farmer friends in the valley are facing, with all their poisons. The biggest problem here seems to be high winds (we are at 1000m elevation), so the challenge for us in comparison with lowlands is to plant seeds directly into soil - that doesn’t work and we have to keep trees in pots until they’re strong enough to withstand winds, which is about 5ft tall/5g pot.


Shadehouse plants are very happy so far, without any fertilizers or irrigation, just on rainwater and lots of worms that were thrown into pots so worm castings for fertilizer basically, and even rare and finicky plants don’t show any deficiencies. Jaboticabas flush non-stop here!
As soon as we protected trees with shadecloth from the wind and burning sun, they perked up and greened up (after being in the open in our previous rental). Interesting thing a local farmer shared with us, native South and Central American trees do well without shade protection, but Asian fruit trees need shade for the first year of life, even the ones that are considered full sun trees and fruit only in full sun.
We also noticed that air layers take much faster here than in FL.


We are very lucky to have both wet and dry areas (up and down the hills), so we can plant both California-climate and Florida-climate plants, so we are super excited about annonas, white sapotes and mangoes and all the tropicals like monsteras, philodendrons and anthuriums, orchids and other pretty ornamentals, but also many cacti, yuccas and agaves. Local mangoes here on the farm are very sweet and abundant, so hopefully new varieties also perform at their best and not get the usual Florida problems, since they will have so much wind and aeration.


Another problem that we inherited from cow herders is landslides, but we’re working on the eroded slopes using vetiver grass (it has massive root system but is non-invasive clumping and doesn't bloom so no seeds), here in CR it’s very popular and widely used for erosion control.


As for insects, there is a new pest that we never had in FL - leaf cutter ants that can defoliate a mature tree in a day, and that has to be controlled somehow because we have seen lots of them on the farm. They “trimmed” an old mango tree fully, leaving no leaves at all… Yet to discover a natural control for them, many people recommend different anecdotal controls but others say they don’t work...


All in all, much fewer challenges here for growing anything, from potatoes & tomatoes to durians & mangosteens, so we are very hopeful and looking forward to our new fruit adventures.

I have about 25 seedlings in 1g. May be able to bare-root and wrap in sphagnum and send if you are interested. I will take $10 per plant. If you don’t find seeds please let me know.

John, Gold Finger is not one of the ones that I have grown yet. Mysore, Rajapuri, Manzano, Ice Cream, Orinocco, Dwarf Cavendish, and Gran Nain.

Satya, are you still looking for SK Carambola?

Yes, i am still looking for scions. I have 2 seedlings that i want to graft to. I had a tree and tasted Sri K before and really liked it. The tree stayed dwarf and compact. But it died, could not figure out why, probably nutritional deficiency and/or planted in the bad spot and got weakened.

Hi Kaz, this is very interesting. Hopefully there will be more interest in the forum for the yellow sapotes now. When i was offering scions for free nobody was interested, and probably it could have been because it was free  . My grafts have grown slowly, one or two flushes since that time i grafted. Since i am in the process of moving out of the country, i will be selling the whole tree, 15g with 5-6 different branches grafted with #6 and #7 and one have a branch with suebelle. The rootstock is the seedling tree that you sent me. My best FL cultivar in terms of taste is also Younghan's Gold.

Aren't the seeds very hard/long to sprout? If it takes for ever to sprout, might not be the easiest veg to start. In our climate, seedlings of surinam(e) spinach produce a similar fleshy tap root. Interesting to find out about oak seedlings, we have to weed lots of them out due to squirrel games.

interesting! I just shot a jyunpaku Okinawan bitter melon short, forgot all about the ripe fruit, otherwise would have included the aril info
https://youtu.be/g0KuhoBa4f8
To be honest, I don't care about the arils that much because I love the unripe fruit cooked as a vegetable or juiced for a shot of healthy - I harvest them all before they're ripe  [size=78%] [/size]
All varieties of bitter melons' arils (red) of a ripe fruit (orange) taste very sweet, even the mini weedy ones.
Even the arils of an unripe fruit have a very different taste than the bitter melon itself. I wouldn't say it's candy sweet but has a very (very!) mild sweet flavor, I wouldn't even call it a flavor, it's probably a hint of sweetness followed by a very light aftertaste of bitter that doesn't last long. An interesting super subtle flavor if you ask me, but I really like the bitter melons of all kinds, and this one is very pretty, with mild bitterness,  the taste blends very well with other vegetables when you cook it, so all in all this vegetable has lots to offer and is worth growing, in my opinion, for many reasons. I would grow them for health benefits anyway, cherry or not 

winged bean is perennial here, they die out for the winter but resprout once the rains begin. I heard that tubers are also edible but I don't kill the vines. They produce pretty well for me in FL, lots of flowers and pods.

Quote from: Satya on July 30, 2023, 11:12:38 AM

Quote from: palmcity on July 30, 2023, 07:54:14 AM

Quote from: Satya on July 29, 2023, 10:43:32 PM

Quote from: fruitnut1944 on July 29, 2023, 08:19:13 PM

Summer pruning does dwarf a tree, some. I summer prune my trees about 6-8 times.

I'm planting 1000 trees in my new farm, and won't have time to excessively prune anything. a solution to managing both small backyard trees and large farms. you won't need to prune 6-8 times,

Some of my mango trees are over 30 years old. I have never pruned more than once a year and I often skip a year. I do not see the big deal in just taking off 1/3 to 1/2 of the canopy after harvest. IMO makes no sense to prune 6-8 times a year unless you are sculpturing the tree like at disney making it look like perhaps micky mouse.

IMO a big tree cut low should produce as much fruit as a runt dwarf tree that is probably more susceptible to not surviving those 30 years as a producing tree anyways.

I guess I just never understood this topic or the need for producing a slow growing runt tree that might die with disease before it ever produces fruit.

But then again, I have no problem handling a chainsaw...

following this logic, all grafted trees should be susceptible and die. What makes a tree grafted to itself more disease susceptible? it won't be a runt, it'll just be a leaderless grafted tree. If anything, trimming will give more chances for parasites to attack the tree than one graft, especially in wet climates. Plus, takes so much time when you have many trees. Grove maintenance takes lots of time if you do it without chemicals, and to add trimming to that would mean more days working haha.
Maybe in Florida and especially your property soil doesn't make them grow super tall and wide because of the special pH, sandy nature, whatever; my FL property is entirely coral and trees also don't grow as tall, and in my Costa Rica property mango trees are super compact probably because of high winds, but that's not always the case, especially in the real tropics with ultra fertile soils, as Nef described above.
Thanks for sharing your experience though.

"following this logic, all grafted trees should be susceptible and die." = FALSE

Satya, You have just failed your Reading Comprehension Test......

All = 100 percent = Total amount

This statement "that is probably more susceptible" implies lack of 100 percent probability.... It was illogical by you to say otherwise....

Thank you everyone who participated. I would never be interested in growing if things, norms, rules were fixed. I will continue to experiment, continue to grow even if i fail, even when i feel the process might be faulty, there is always something to learn even from failures. Thank you.

Low nitrogen fertilizing along with letting a precocious tree hold fruit early can have a stunting effect. While it doesn't always work, and can also kill a tree, sometime it does have a stunting effect. One of my oldest trees was a Hatcher planted in the ground as a 3 gal. Here is a photo of it 10 years later.



After holding lots of fruit it would only have a few growth spurts before flowering again. It has since been top worked to a Orange Sherbet which, so far, is growing more than fruiting.

Thanks Frank!

Hi Ryan, thanks for the info.
yes looking for a specific good variety and on top of that on a dwarf rootstock is mission impossible, it's like looking for a unicorn - unless you graft yourself, it would be crazy luck to come across. Alex is probably starting to graft on it? Would be great to have that option.
For tropicals, there are not many trees that are naturally small, so if this technique works that might be a great solution to harvesting and especially bagging fruit - here in Costa Rica fruit flies are ruthless, they don't leave any soft fruit untouched, how to bag if a tree is 30 meters tall...

Hi Tim! Great to experiment, you could also do this technique and see if it grows an extra leader once the main leader is cut off, and whether there is a difference in the production of the approach grafted side branch in comparison with other branches on the same tree. My hypothesis is that the tree will think it still has the leader and transfer all the vigor to the grafted side branch, and make it much more productive. I was really impressed to see in person how durians fruit when given adequate space (they require 10 meters all around!) and Jesse mentioned that he's going to try this technique on his durians to make them more compact but as productive (see photo:). I will also do this to several vigorous trees and watch them closely, will share results later on, whatever the results are