The Tropical Fruit Forum

1. Bruce: It was surprisingly sweet like it been mix with Splenda. Very creamy and moist compare to the others.

Great video Rain, very helpful. The Bruce also has the advantage of very large fruit. Sometimes it seems like the biggest fruit have multiple seeds taking up extra space!

I think California will be your best bet. White Sapote is not popular here in Florida. I can't think of any nursery that is propagating it in great quantity.

California has way more fruiting trees so they will have more seeds to graft onto. You might even think about grafting it yourself to sustain your future supply. You can buy fruit and seeds on etsy pretty easily.

Alex Salazar has a list of insurance mango trees: Angie, Honey Kiss, Cecilove, Cac, Edward, Dwarf Hawaiian, Rosigold and Pickering. Any of those should be bulletproof to grow in terms of disease with excellent flavor. You can select for vigor and flavor and season depending on your preferences.

You already have Carrie (May-July) and Kathy (July-August). Some of the early mango varieties can bear multiple crops, like Rosigold and Dwarf Hawaiian. I went with Dwarf Hawaiian for my very early variety and I don't think you can go wrong with that. If you prefer to add a late season tree then I think Honey Kiss would be the top flavor and production off the insurance list.

I would encourage you to go with either Dwarf Hawaiian or Honey Kiss depending on when you want to eat your mangoes.

Tasting Mamey Sapote convinced me to go past backyard mango grower to crazy fruit tree collector. On a trip to Xain's World to buy Mamey trees, Xain sold me a Whitman Green Sapote tree and since then I've been looking for an opportunity to taste the fruit. I've heard several people say they prefer Green Sapote to Mamey Sapote, so when I saw the 5 pound box of Whitman go up for sale on the Lara Farms website, I placed my order right away.

As he always does, Julian sent way more than the listed amount, about 8.5 pounds of fruit. At $85/box plus shipping, Green Sapote is one of the most expensive fruits available on the Lara Farms site and works out to over $10/pound. While that's a premium price compared to supermarket bananas, I don't know anywhere else that sells Green Sapote, and it's still less than some of the exorbitant fruit shippers in Homestead selling tropical fruit sampler boxes.

Once again, my expectations were confounded by the Whitman Green Sapote tasting...

General Notes: The Green Sapote fruit is small, ranging in size from chicken egg to kiwi fruit. As the fruit ripens, the skin wrinkles and the color changes from olive green to coppery red. Most fruit have a single seed with a hard wooden shell. The flesh is pinkish orange in color and can be scooped out with a spoon. The overall unimpressive external appearance might explain why Green Sapote has remained such an obscure fruit.


That's a teaspoon for size comparison!

Texture: Firmer flesh than Key West Mamey Sapote (which I find creamy when ripe), and slightly lacking in moisture. Even when the skin is wrinkled and soft, the flesh has more body and chew than I would like. At least you can peel the skin off easily with a paring knife. Each fruit also contained a few small fibrous shards of debris near the stem end, requiring care to avoid when eating, along with some firm areas directly around the seed.

Sweetness: moderate sweetness, slightly less sweet than any Mamey Sapote that I've tried. I expected sweeter.

Flavor: After trying more than ten fruit at different stages of ripeness, I am still struggling to define what I'm tasting. Yes, it's similar to Mamey Sapote, but lacking the complexity and depth of flavor of Mamey. It tastes slightly like Sapodilla, but without the sweetness and background spice. The Green Sapote reminds me of a roasted carrot with a little more sugar, not the most tropical flavor. The exotic notes that make Mamey Sapote so intoxicating are missing.

Uses: Probably best to just eat the fruit with a spoon - it would take a lot of work to break down 5 or 6 of them for a milkshake.

Rating: Whitman Green Sapote  ranks behind Mamey Sapote and Sapodilla for me. The small size and flat flavor are clear disadvantages. It does fruit in the dead of winter but you can find Sapodilla (and some Mamey cultivars) available around the same time as Green Sapote. The reputed cold-hardiness of Green Sapote may give some advantage over Mamey and Sapodilla to growers in colder climates and maybe that is where the real value lies.

Bill Whitman did some amazing things with tropical fruit, and one of those was getting Green Sapote to fruit in South Florida. However, this selection, the Whitman Cultivar, needs more development. Like the Haden mango, it should be considered a starting point from which we can develop larger, more flavorful and sweeter fruit, from more precocious trees. The lack of Green Sapote cultivars (only 2 or 3 available?) shows that very little work has been done with Green Sapote and there is a lot of potential for improvement by the kind of people the read this forum.

Excellent news! So put them in the forever pots with cactus mix now?

Conventional wisdom is to step the trees up gradually from 3 to 7 to 15 to 25 gallon as the root ball fills each pot. Some say putting a small tree in a huge pot can lead to problems and root rot, though I can't say that from experience. I wouldn't let a tree smaller than 15 gallon hold fruit for container growing so you probably have 1 or 2 seasons without fruit ahead.

I mulch my potted mangoes with grass clippings and wood chips, in addition to small amounts of granular fertilizer. I think they like it.

1. Microclimate overrides any other concern for me. The dry areas with best drainage get Avocado, Mamey Sapote, White Sapote and whatever trees you determine can't tolerate wet feet. Wetter areas with poorer drainage get Bananas, Sapodillas, Jaboticaba and Coconut. Mango is somewhere in between. Check the moisture levels in various areas and research which trees you want to plant do best in those conditions.

2. Overplant, both in density and quantity. Trees will die, some will grow bigger than expected, some will stay smaller than expected. It takes 5 - 10 years for spacing to become an issue and during that time you will learn a lot about what you want and change your mind many times. You will remove trees and relocate trees for many different reasons.

3. Consider the vertical shape of the tree and the openness of its canopy. Some Mamey trees and Avocado trees have a more open, skeletal limb structure that lets light through. Other trees are more like dense umbrellas (star fruit, black sapote). Coconuts grow straight up with a limited canopy. To some extent you won't know the exact habit until you plant it, and you can control it somewhat with pruning. Take advantage of the canopy shapes by putting a tall upright tree next to a low shrubby tree and packing them in tighter. A great example would be a seedling jackfruit that wants to go straight up next to (and very close to) a Mango tree that can be pruned and trained into a dense low shrub. Now you are maximizing the vertical space as well as the horizontal space.

4. Spacing only applies to permanent long-term trees like Avocado, Mango, Mamey, Sapodilla, Star Fruit, Custard Apple, White Sapote, Black Sapote. These are the high production trees for the future and you won't want to move them. I planted mine at 10 - 15 foot spacing, mostly around 12 feet. Anything else can be stuffed in between them, especially trees that fruit quickly because it's no big loss if you have to move a tree that fruits within a year or two (guava, Pigeon Pea, Papaya, Barbados Cherry, Loquat, Pitomba, Grumichama, COTRG etc).

5. I have temporary and permanent bananas. The permanent banana patch is in a low, wet area with taro root. The temporary banana plants provide early shade to the juvenile fruit trees, just don't plant them too close. Eventually you will dig out the temporary bananas and you don't want the corm to grow into the roots of your mango or avocado tree.

The squirrels know that Lula is tasty.

Anybody that is looking for Reed avocado, Julian just activated that option on his site. I ordered a mix box so I hopefully I get at least one Reed in there.

is it ok to use paver sand or play sand?

I have used both with no problems, but generally buy the playground sand.

I've learned to go easy on the organic matter in the potting mix - it can become sludge and rot the roots. You can add any organic amendments on top of the soil where they can easily be removed or adjusted if it goes wrong. The mix in the pot should contain sand, perlite, maybe some pine bark fines, and then some ProMix or other high quality potting soil. Play with the ratio until you get it loose and fluffy, not mucky and dense. Once it's potted then you can top dress with grass clippings or wood chips or whatever you prefer. I've found that my young mango trees really like grass clippings from the wild fields behind my house. A light application of granular fertilizer around the edge of the pot helps too.

The sand is key, though. If I dig down six inches in my back yard it is straight up sand.

You can move the Pickering to a larger pot when you start to see root hairs coming out the bottom of the current pot. Pickering should be pretty difficult to kill.

The "Subway" avocado cultivar? It practically named itself.

Maybe there's somebody out there that can use the seeds. I have about 15 - 20 seeds of Whitman Green Sapote and roughly the same amount of Fairchild #2 Canistel. Price is $3 per seed plus shipping cost.

It looks like they are all gone for now. Hopefully I replied to all private messages. If you missed out, keep in touch, I will have more in the future.

 

I think Ross is the earliest season of the canistels, the season for it may be over already.