The Tropical Fruit Forum

End of October has been true in the past, but this yr has been so cool & cloudy, maybe earlier.  I’d put a black garbage bag over the rack that’s in the 4th picture.  (Increase the heat & humidity).  Leave enough holes to keep it from becoming a fungal sauna.  When it’s obvious we won’t get more warm days, cut the rack off & finish ripening in your garage.  If it’s mature enough, it’ll ripen (like what grocery stores sell).

I have a question for you.  I have an immature Goldfinger.  How high is the crook (or upside down “U”) off the ground?  And do yours need to be propped?  I’ve had other kinds of bananas that needed no propping for years; then when a really bountiful year came, & the rack was unusually heavy it had to be propped.  (One that wasn’t propped actually broke.). So I want to make an adjustable prop ahead of time that’ll accomodate the Goldfinger’s height if needed.

According to your acount here, sounds like you did all the right things.  I'd keep all the documentation you have just in case you need to pull it out for whatever reason.  But I doubt that you'll be "blacklisted" by other sellers.  Just my 2 cents.

Brad, about the skinny top variety on a fat rootstock:  I've seen this once in person.  It wasn't avocado; don't remember what fruit, much less the varieties of rootstock & scion.  But the thing ended up dying.

I've also seen the opposite: swelling scion on top of normal-size rootstock.  That one I have in a pot myself: Persian black mulberry on top of Pakistan black.  That combination consistently behaves this way.  I've seen it in a friend's full-grown mulberry tree also, with the same arrangement: Persian on top swelling, Pakistan on bottom normal.  I'd guess that there's some kind of "incompatibility" (for lack of a better word) when grafting certain combinations -- even though both parts of the graft are the same kind of fruit (apple on apple).  In some cases it looks like the sap flows up better than it flows down; in other cases, vice-versa.  I've never heard any biological specifics of why or how.  I'm not sure anyone has studied it enough to know.  If they have, I'd like to know.

I don't care for the astringent (soft ripe) fruits so I only have multi-grafted non-astringent persimmons on my trees. I haven't found any variety that is not compatible yet. Here's what I have grafted on Giant Fuyu , Matsumoto, and Hayakume trees.

1   Chocolate
2   Coffee Cake
3   Fuyu
4   Great Wall
5   Hayakume
6   Izu
7   Jiro
8   Kurokuma
9   Maru
10   Matsumoto
11   Saijo
12   Suruga

Just so you know, if your #8 (Kurokuma) is the scion that you got from me, there are a couple of issues here.

1.  It isn't a Kurokuma.  It's a seedling of Kurokuma.  I started it from a seed that I got from a Kurokuma fruit that I ate at a persimmon tasting at UCANR.  I know that the fruit I ate was a Kurokuma persimmon, but no one knows what the pollinator was.  I'm sure I made this clear before I sent it to you, but it might have skipped your mind; we had a nice exchange, and probably covered enough details that it would be easy to forget this little bit of info.  So the fruit you get from that scion might be like Kurokuma, but it might be totally different, since the gene pool got scrambled around in the midst of all that hot sex persimmons have.   

2.  Also, if this seedling takes after its Kurokuma parent, it will be an astringent fruit.  I understand people liking the ease of eating non-astringent fruit.  You don't have to worry about whether the thing has been pollinated, or treated in some way to eliminate (hopefully!) the astringency.  But for the record, I'll say that I haven't ever tasted a non-astringent persimmon that has quite the complexity of rich flavors that Kurokumas I've tasted have had.  (And I tasted a wide variety of persimmons at the UCANR tastings in two different years.)

3.  I'm still waiting to get fruit from the Kurokuma seedling.  None yet.  I hope it will produce for the first time this year.  But one thing is clear already: I have a multigraft persimmon tree, and this is the 2nd year in a row that the Kurokuma seedling branch is the first branch to break bud.  In fact, I went out to see it today, and its buds are opening now.  Matsumoto Wase (the scion I got from you) and Tsurunoko ("Chocolate" from Dave Wilson Nursery) are still dormant.

I hope that helps.

Just so everyone knows, the video is from Gary at Laguna Hills Nursery in Orange County, California.  It's about an hour and a half in length.

This photo shows why the base of the tree swells as the flower emerges. Hard to understand but every leaf and eventually the flower forms down deep in the base and squeezes through to emergence.

Great photo!  Thanks for posting it!

No matter which thread I search, what I search for, or even if I'm not in a thread yet, this is the message I get.  Is CleanTalk preventing the search function from working correctly?

Thanks for looking into this and for the explanation, JakeFruit!

Right one is Lolo. The harvest time in PR is February to March ( more oil)but I cant miss the oportunity.

Thank you for sending them!  It was a treat to have some all the way from Puerto Rico.

Got my first PM in a long time today, but got no email about it.  I saw in the Help that if we're running version 2.0 in "Change Settings" there's an option to "Notify by email every time you receive a personal message".  I found it and changed that option from "Always" to "Never" and then back again.  Hopefully that will trick the setting into working correctly.  We'll see.

I'll be there.  Looking forward to it!

Thanks for adding helpful details pineislander.