The Tropical Fruit Forum

Hey Doglips! You mean one THESE??? And no, it doesn't live in my greenhouse in Boise - it is from the real, and beloved, Daintree, where we are moving just as soon as we hit the lottery.  It made my little heart go pitter-patter...


Ok, just found this one also.  These are the only two that turned out, out of about 100 shots with a 600mm telephoto lens.  Bummer I was still shooting film - I think these cost me about $80 per shot! 

I am looking for some "butter fruit" seeds, scientific name is dacryodes edulis.  My daughter-in-law is from Cameroon, and goes on and on about this fruit.  She calls it a "plum".  Took quite a while to figure out what it was that we needed to find!
Thanks!

Mr. Newbie/DainTree - Before I moved from upstate NY, I was getting ready to do
exactly what you've done.  SUch a great setup you have.  Would love to see more
pictures when you learn how to post them!

I wonder what your electric bill is each month, though I'm sure it's all still worth
it at the end of the day.  So the greenhouse has been up about 4 years - you must have
some fruit production by now...

Gorgeous little pink and black bird, by the way.....

Good luck amigo.....gary

Hi Gary,
The furnace is gas, and my setup DOES cost as much to heat as the house - about $600 a year.  I turn the furnace on for the first time usually in early October and run it through April.  If the sun is out, the thermostat shuts it off during the day, even in a real cold snap.  My worst month is usually January, when we get down below 0F for days, and never get above freezing during the day.  I have NEVER dropped below 50F at night, but I do shut the door between the two environments, and keep the temperate house just above freezing.  If we get below 0F, I use an electric booster heater.  But, it is still cheaper than two people going to the movies every week...

Oh yeah - fruit - I have had a couple of banana crops, LOTS of lemons, limes, kumquats and tangors, lots of coffee, no cacao yet, lots of monstera, loads of dwarf and regular pineapple (I quit growing the big ones since they take up so much room), and still waiting on the lychees and loquats.  The dragon fruit both refuse to bloom, even when I speak harshly to them.  My jackfruit seeds are coming up, though, so another ten years and I will be all set!

Will the quail eat slugs, or slug eggs, by any chance? The slug eggs actually look pretty tasty - I wonder if you can make caviar from them.
I will take some small file-size pictures tomorrow and post them.
Thanks!

Hi!
I wanted to share my greenhouse, since I love it so much.
We named it Daintree, after our favorite tropical area in Australia.

We built the 15x20 ft tropical portion of the greenhouse from a kit in 2009.  It is twin-wall 8 mil polycarbonate, and came with an exhaust fan, intake vent, and 15,000 btu gas heater.  It is oriented with the front door to the east, and the long walls face north and south.
Immediately, it became too small!

We built a 10x10 foot addition, for those things that prefer chill hours.  It was stick-built, with corrugated polycarbonate on both the inside and outside of the 2x4 frame.  In the winter, I can shut the door between the two houses and keep the temps in the temperate house above freezing using a 16x16 inch window between the two houses.  I get night-time lows of 50F in the tropical house.

There are weeks in the winter when the daytime temps never get above freezing, and nighttime temps are in the single digits or below 0 F.  But we get about 250 clear sunny days per year, so the heat gain during the day, even in the winter, means the furnace rarely kicks on until late afternoon.  The furnace make a LOT of water vapor, so there are some winter days when it actually gets foggy in there!

We get very hot in the summer (weeks over 100 F), so I put up a 30% shade canopy around the end of May.  There is a HUGE benefit (additional 10-20 F of cooling!) to having the canopy elevated above the roof, instead of laying on it. 

We located Daintree so that it gets some shade from our maple tree in the summer, increasing the total shade to about 50%.  There is a powerful exhaust fan that turns on at 90 F.  I take the shade down in September but leave the frame up all year.

In the winter, I use full-spectrum flood-lights at various heights that come on in the morning and evening.  The plants all get adequate light to bloom and fruit, except for my dragonfruit (aargh!).

I built a 150 gallon pond that I fill using filtered city water.  I drop a sump pump and fertilizer into it and water everything with a hose.  I also give frequent “rain showers” to prevent spider mites (although I am still arguing with the mealy bugs about who is boss, sometimes!).

There is a BIG slug problem, especially in summer, because we flood irrigate, and get 2 inches of water on the floor every week.  A favorite night-time activity is slug-picking!

I raise Bourkes grasskeets, and they fly free in the greenhouse year-round (there are nets under the perches, which eliminates “poop-fall”).  They help prune the monstera, epiphylums and dragonfruit!  Anything they are not allowed to touch has a net over it…

So far, it has held up to marble-sized hail, sustained winds of 65 mph, and a couple of HUGE branches breaking off the maple tree.

Don't know if this counts as a "fruit" injury, but when I was building my greenhouse, I got my hair caught in the drill as I was, literally, putting in the VERY LAST screw.  My hair is pretty long, and when my ponytail came out of the holder as I was leaning into the drill (self-tapping screw into a steel post...), it got sucked into the drill so fast that the drill flew up and slammed into my face before I could do anything.  It broke my cheekbone, and I woke up my husband and half the neighbors at 6:00 on a Sunday morning as I screamed bloody murder.
The only thing the ER doctor asked me, after laughing his fool head off, was "WHY were you building a greenhouse at 6:00 on a Sunday morning???". 
He just didn't understand...

Hi, my name is Cassandra. I'm not in the greatest climate (zone 5B) for growing tropical fruit trees, but after I spent 6 weeks in Thailand last fall, I fell in love with a few! My favorites were longan. I planted a few seeds after I returned to the states and I now have three beautiful little longan trees. They seemed to do OK outside during the summer months, but I really think they prefer the indoors here because of some issues we have with high winds in their outdoor space. The other fruit I just love is jackfruit! I ended up receiving 32 seeds last month and thought, what the heck, I'll try planting. 31 out of the 32 have sprouted, and the most robust already have leaves on them. If they keep growing at this pace, the will soon be taller than my year-old longan!

Ideally, I would love to own a small greenhouse for them all, but that's just not possible in my location. I have all my trees on a large table in my room with a grow light suspended above them. I dunno how long this setup will last, depending on how tall the jackfruit get. I've brought in a heater, which I normally do for the winter, so this room should be at a minimum in the 70's.

I am here mainly because I have never grown anything tropical beyond these guys and I need all the pointers I can get.

Nice to meet you all!




P.S. Yes, I even have a Thai pepper plant in the mix now too.

I have 3 Tetracarpidium conophorum (conophor nut, African walnut) vine seedlings (about 3 feet tall) grown in my Idaho greenhouse using nuts from the Kumba area of Cameroon.  They SHOULD be unrelated, but I'm not positive.
I would like to trade them for Dacryodes edulis (butter fruit, African plum) seeds or seedlings, and/or Synsepalum dulcificum (miracle fruit) seeds or seedlings, or another fruit seeds or plants from West Africa.  Would also be interested in buying any of these outright.
Thanks!