The Tropical Fruit Forum

It depends on the spondias. The spondias we call jocote, I think that is s. purpurea is grown from cuttings here in CR.  Spondias mombin does germinate and starts all over the place as a volunteer on my farm.
Peter

That would be great Durian lover. I was in Bali in the 70’s and it was wonderful. However, I’ve been avoiding it so to preserve what’s left of those memories. But for a fruit trip it could make sense. I’ll let you know. Many thanks.
Peter

Instead of trying to wrap very tender material we use clips and bag the graft. No wrapping necessary.
Peter

You are going to need more than the leaf to get a good id. There are lots of piper out there.
Peter

My inclination is to mulch normally. What is really doing this on my farm is nutmeg.

It hates dry.
Peter

They can also be tied over at an almost horizontal angle, but once they start flowering they don’t grow so much taller.
Peter

Anybody using Azomite?
Peter

How about blackberry jam fruit or lime berry?
Peter

Costa Rica  looks small on a map but has quite a variety of climate zones from lowland up to more than 8000’.
At our farm we are starting durian right now and there will be two peaks in September and October. There’s a lot of fruits that go along with that like champedek, Marang, garcinias like cherapu and Brunei cherry. There’s plenty of native fruits as well.
To know for sure about next April or so it would take checking back by December so we know what the corresponding flowering season has been like.
There are many places to look for fruits here. The Thursday farmers market in San Isidro, General has rare fruits from all over CR and there are many colder weather fruits there like Cherimoya, tree tomato, etc. I frequently find fruits there that I’ve never seen before and I have a collection of more than 200 kinds and have been exposed to many more.
Costa Rica has a very good farmers market system all over the country. The Tico is a good fruit customer so fruit stands and markets are well supported.
Peter

I get that it is a cool thing to have a mangosteen tree in a 15 gallon pot with 20 fruit on it!
I used a cleft graft on an area of wood becoming green perhaps 5/16 thick or so. I wrapped everything with parafilm.
What makes this expensive is that the rootstock needs to be about 2 years old.  With mangosteen I only have experience grafting it onto the same species but I imagine it should be easy enough on another Asian garcinia. I have even grafted garcinia with different color saps successfully. I feel it’s an easier graft than pouterias, artocarpus, and durios which are other stuff I am grafting commercially.
Peter

I grow mangosteen commercially.  We harvested 1500kg at our last harvest.  I also have a fruit tree nursery and used to graft mangosteen.  They’re easy to graft as are many garcinias, but I try to talk people out of using grafted mangosteen.
I’ve tried scions from different parts of the trees but the result has always been the same.  They do produce faster but fail to develop a good shape and so for a farm I think seedlings is the only way to go.
Peter

Sounds like good conditions. Not too sure about the Daintree getting almost 4m by now!  That’s kind of extreme, hope that doesn’t happen here.
Our rainfall ranges from 2m-5.5m but averages more like 3.5 probably.
Peter