The Tropical Fruit Forum

It's mostly about weather, climate, species, variety, genetics and management. Apparently I missed the memo that production has nothing to do with the mineral content of soils, their properties and management.

I bought some custom fruit tree potting mix for small quantities of seeds that were hard for me to find. Now that a number of different things have germinated, I've seen that damping off has been a problem for a number of seedlings, and even though I'm using air-pruning pots, I notice the mix never really dries out, and grows algae, liverwort, and other weeds indicating very wet conditions.

Back in California, I used to use Ocean Forest potting mix straight out of the bag, and never had any problems.

This mix I bought here in Peru is apparently too heavy. Is there something I can add to it (without disturbing the tree seedlings) that can help aerate it a bit better? For the pots that never germinated anything, I was thinking about mixing in perlite before planting something else.

Part one: https://tropicalfruitforum.com/index.php?topic=55319.0

Image searching online was pretty much useless in helping me figure out this next one. I'm about 99% sure I know what this is. If it is what I think, then the reason image searching doesn't work very well is because there are not many photos of foliage from young trees of this species.

The first photos are all of the same tree. The last photo is of a smaller tree.

Someone wants to sell us "cuttings" of vanilla for us to grow Is that right? I had assumed that they would be selling seeds instead, but I'm a total vanilla novice so what do I know.

Can anyone here point me to some successful examples of silvopasture with cows and high-density tree plantings? Most examples I see are very widely spaced plantings or dense plantings but within widely spaced rows. I'm interested in seeing something more similar to what we have here which is trees everywhere planted very close.

Sorry Cacao fans this one isn't for you. Cacao seeds are horrible. That's why most people ferment them and add sugar. The labor requirement is immense to actually properly process the seeds. The pulp is very minimal and, I will admit, has a decent flavor, a little sour but OK. However, the amount of pulp is too minimal to be worthwhile. Plus Cacao has next to no tolerance of aluminum saturation, so it's just not a good choice for many tropical soils. Pure cacao doesn't even have a nice stimulating effect. I much prefer coffee or coca leaf if I want something that's a stimulant. Also Cacao is high in oxalates.

We planted Theobroma bicolor. One of them fruited at two years, most fruited at three years. They seem pretty forgiving of poor soil. The pulp is delicious (a creamier flavor vs. the tart flavor of the cacao) and there is a decent amount unlike Cacao. The best part: the seeds. They are like gigantic, fat pumpkin seeds that taste exquisite when toasted.

This is more of a question geered towards folks that have large tracts of land and dense grassy or herbaceous weed pressure.

Our property is a former cattle pasture. We've gone for over a year in certain areas before re-weedwacking them. It got pretty thick, but still manageable. Wasp nest encounters increased. Grass itself isn't such a concern, because it pretty much grows to fullsize within a matter of four months and then stagnates thereafter.

Today I was on one of our steep hills banging the weedwacker blade on many of the hidden rocks on that slope, and thinking to myself, as much money as we spend (waste?) on weedwacking, it would be great to just neglect areas for much longer periods of time.

Of course, I've thought a lot about cows, but that's a big investment onto itself, and demands quite a commitment, as well as patience, which I'm not overflowing with. Also, our trees haven't been large enough to handle the impact. Mostly I still don't feel they'd be ready to handle the impact in most sectors.

On some parts of the property the grass is starting to be significantly shaded, and certainly loses vigor compared to full-sun grass. I'm sure a bunch of climbing vines would start to become problematic like tropical kudzu. Also scattered, woody weeds would probably become more commonplace.. I don't think the trees that are already at least twice as high as the weeds would die all-of-sudden just because the weeds are there. Small trees might die just because they can't photosynthesize, but overall I'd expect the trees to just keep growing. Probably a lot more machete work would be required to ever "recover" the property.

Can anyone point to any examples of tropical orchards that were left fallow? Perhaps some ecological studies with detailed chronological photos? I know a lot of people act like it's the end of the world if there's a lot of dense weediness, so perhaps there's not much firsthand knowledge here?

I look at all these video titles and they pretty much say the same thing: "This was the worst soil on the planet, and then overnight with my super magical green thumb, everything changed!

That pretty much sums it up. Add in a dash of flowery language...voila!

I haven't seen videos where they actually show detailed soil analysis to prove just how "bad" their soil was at the start. Nor is the viewer graced with the results of a third party audit to detail the inputs added or economics of the entire operation. I mean I could make a terrible soil great in a day, just give me a back hoe, rototiller and a few side-dump loads of lime and compost.

Here's an example of what I'm talking about:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cc3-3s115mM

And a comment I read in its comment section that pretty much sums up my thoughts:
"Title is a little deceiving, that's not "desert sand", that area of Baja is quite fertile and local farmers have been growing vegetables there for decades. This isn't new at all, why do foreign people like to try to appropriate everything? Give due credit to the local guys who have been doing this for decades and pioneered these techniques."


I'm on this soapbox, because I know everyone's trying so hard to motivate others by making it look easy - like if you just take a PDC and listen to hippies talk about fairies then you can take a box of seeds and some builders clay and scatter seeds in the middle of the Sahara Desert, forests will pop out of nowhere, and the wildebeast will once again roam the ancient plains of the extinct Saharan prairie browsing tree Aloes to help ward off skin cancer. Nonetheless, everything is so much more nuanced than presented and there are situations where the same approach will be a disaster in someone else's neck of the woods.

My favorite ones are the ones where they plant thousands of trees and then "walk away" and come back a few years later, supposedly for the first time, with all sorts of camera gear, and ooh and ahh about how neat the new forest is, and brag about how only a few of the tree saplings have died. Congratulations, you have good soil. Go try that in most parts of the world on severely degraded, marginal, non-ag land and you might as well throw away money.

I've been a regular listener to the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast by John Kempf. He definitely favors sap analysis over foliar testing, which I understand. I personally don't have such a service available near here, so I had to do a foliar analysis instead. Either way, I don't think I'm going to be doing either test on a regular basis. I doubt many on this forum would either. It seems more geared towards commercial growers that need to keep things on point to make realtime adjustments. It's a pretty useful tool, but you probably need to have a commercial operation to justify the cost of that level of precision.

What are your recommendations? I'm interested in touring awe-inspiring edible fruit gardens and extremely beautiful botanical gardens with lots of palm trees and vibrant tropical flowers, etc.

Also planning a visit to ECHO, as I've always heard good things about their demonstration gardens to get ideas for rural development work.

Also, what else is fun to do in Florida? Thinking about visiting Key West, as I've never been. Also want to swim with the manatees north of Tampa area.

I probably won't: Do the beaches of Miama, everglades, disney...been there done that.

I understand it's common for them to be intercepted at the destination country, but do you folks ever have problems getting shipments out of the origin country?

Which is it? Can't remember. Apparently one is a cut above the rest, whereas the others aren't even considered "true" cinnamon..Some of the inferior species I've heard are actually somewhat toxic.

There are only a few spots on our land where Avocados have done OK. We started direct-planting more from seed, which has been more successful, but I think it will always be an uphill battle for the most part to have good avocado production here.

Our location is in Amazonia, but with a distinct dry season between June and October. Rainfall is pretty low this time of year. We only received 1.8 inches this year in July. August seems like it might turn out to be even less than that. These are typically the two driest months of the year. The soil is naturally acidic here for the most part, and of course it was leached over multiple decades following deforestation, which made it more acidic, so recommendations should be for a fruit that grows well in acidic conditions. Some parts of the property have pretty bad aluminum saturation, such as the spot from the soil analysis I'm going to share. Would be good for the recommended species to be aluminum resistant. I took the soil sample from the least productive part of the property. Some areas are night and day by comparison, but still I've seen Avocado only thrive in a few key spots, and even those will probably require continued addition of lime in the future.

Someone suggested Macadamias might be good for acidic soil. Well we tried about one hundred trees and only one has performed decently. Most died.

Results from our Avocado foliar analysis are pending.

I'd like to grow something equivalent to Avocado, but I know there is no substitute. Something fatty and delicious would be nice. Maybe tropical Walnut (Juglans neotropica) or Dipteryx alata. Preferably something with a big seed that I can direct sow, which will have enough energy to get the shoot taller than our Brachiaria grasses within the first six months of growth. How about Bertholettia excelsa? Would you recommend African Oil Palm? Surprisingly seeds of many species are hard to find in Peru, as it's not like in the US where you just go online. You really have to know someone in an area where there are trees, and the person has to be trustworthy enough to provide you with fresh stock. Out of all the species I mentioned, I think the African Oil Palm seeds would be the easiest to acquire. We are at about 900m elevation, which gets a little cooler than the low jungle, but I still find it plenty hot. In the dry season most days are sunny and top out at 90 degrees. I haven't gotten solid data on annual rainfall ( just installed a rain gauge last month) for our location. I would say somewhere between 2000-3000mm avg. annual rainfall based on some of the data I've seen for other towns nearby in drier microclimates.

We're three years into this. So most areas already have significant canopy cover with a couple different Inga spp., Schizolobium, and the local Erythrina spp. Therefore, I think some "higher order" trees might perform well being sown at this stage.

The topsoil in our sample surprised me a bit. I wasn't expecting to see the pH that high and the organic matter at 2.58% is higher than I expected. That result is even after excluding the top two inches, because we've been running chickens and other poultry through the area over the past few months, and I didn't want their manure to affect the results too much. The subsoil is still about as awful as when we started three years ago though.

Just a warning though: This is a pretty extreme example. It is the area on the property where we've seen the least amount of growth from all tree species we planted 3 years ago. Some died, and most just sat there stunted. They have been unable to compete satisfactorily with the Brachiaria, whereas in other areas of the property we have seen satisfactory tree growth amongst Brachiaria.

Test Results: