re: Louisiana Tropical Fruit Gardening - Experiences and Updates

In ground, 34F is my cutoff. This is for citrus and cattley guava. I have an in ground tropical hibiscus that I baby when it hits the 40s, but that's overkill.

For potted stuff, I don't let anything except natives feel the 30s. One or two nights in the 40s is fine but if we are seeing prolonged temperatures in the 40s, everything goes inside the greenhouse or shed. This is overkill and you can absolutely make mid 30s your cutoff to avoid frosts, but I find that things stop growing and are more likely to get sick with lots of long-term cold exposure. All my stuff is on wheels so I can move like 20 plants/trees in about 5 minutes.

At 39F the danger is frost. You can get nasty frost in the upper 30s that will burn foliage and flowers. But one night is likely nothing to worry about unless you've got something crazy going on like durian/soursop/mangosteen/etc.

Great plan and exactly what I did. You need a trial run with real data to figure out how much wiggle room you really have. My low this winter was a record 18F and my greenhouse low was 48F.

Make sure you have some kind of redundancy in place for heating. Murphy's law says that next winter your heater is going to break or worse you lose power during a deep freeze. Don't spend years growing this stuff just to lose it all when your power fails and it's 20F outside. I have an extra heater for equipment failure and a propane heater for loss of power. I also have my battery powered temperature sensors send me alerts when certain thresholds are reached. Greenhouse hits 40F? Alert pops up. That way my stuff can't fail without my knowledge. I also keep 5 gallon buckets of water in each corner of the greenhouse to mitigate cold. When it's a deep freeze I fill them with hot water from the tub.

I just went through the Florida's Best Fruiting Plants book listed in the OP and ranked the cold hardiness of a bunch of my trees. I did not include things with wide variation like bananas, oranges, and lemons. From most to least cold hardy:

Fig
Feijoa
Kumquat
Loquat
White sapote
Carambola
Lychee
Cattley guava / atemoya
Lime / sapodilla
Jamaican cherry
Mango
Guava

Very surprised about guava. They take a lot of damage but roots will survive.

Atemoya being slightly more cold hardy than lime is awesome. Have been doing limes for years.

Biggest surprise is white sapote. Holy shite. A distant cousin of citrus that is more cold hardy than all of them except mandarins and kumquats. Very interesting and I now have serious interest in investigating in-ground white sapote.

Nice structure on the Loquat

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I’m getting ready to repot my guava. Any reason to not go straight to a 15 gallon or so pot? I’ll be using a homemade mix of sand/peat/perlite with an inch or two of composted bark on top. Probably use shredded leaves to mulch. I do have a 7ish gallon nursery pot I could also use if that’s better.

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As long as your mix drains, you can go straight to 15gal. I do a third of each. Just make sure you water it evenly, soaking the whole pot and not just the root ball. Guavas are not picky about soil.

I bought the right tree this time.





Got a 16" pot to put it in. Light plastic so it's not as hard to tote around. I'd been aggravated all week that I'd bought a papaya but this was my first chance to go to Home Depot

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Consider drilling extra holes in that pot. Ever watch There Will Be Blood?

DRAINAGE!! DRAINAGE, MY BOY!!!

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Will do. I had to go back to Home Depot at lunch after reading one of your soil mix recommendations. I have to order perlite but I have sand and peat. Going to put some gravel in the bottom of the pot as well. Thanks

That’s the one I bought also. What kind of cold tolerance for that variety? When does it bloom, how long to set fruit ?

Dwarf guava nana potted up.



Passionfruit vine coming out of dormancy.



Couple of new pygmy date palms.



Also, I need to give even more praise to Hani Nunez and his South Florida business Montura Gardens. Hani sends you pictures of the exact trees that he delivers to you, so here is the Pickering mango he selected for me yesterday:



It's a good tree. Branch structure is a little wonky low on the trunk and needs some pruning to shape it properly, but I was totally satisfied with this and told him so.

Today however, he texts me with the following message and photo:

"I found you a much nicer Pickering 15g"



Now if you know anything about Pickering, it's not exactly a "standard form" grower. It stays short, wide, and bushy and tends to let fruit hang on the ground, necessitating props and ties to keep them up. This is about the straightest, most standard form Pickering I have ever seen. The structure of this tree is fantastic and the options for shaping are basically unlimited. The unusually long trunk is going to keep fruit off the ground. Hani did not have to do this. The deal was already done. When people go above and beyond like this for a first time customer they have never met or even talked to on the phone, they deserve to be recognized. Hats off to Montura Gardens and I highly recommend checking them out if you are in south Florida.