re: Louisiana Tropical Fruit Gardening - Experiences and Updates

Lastly, planted 2 Pickering mango seeds for rootstock today. Will graft mature Pickering on when they are 1g size. Mango seeds are 100X easier to de-husk than white sapote.

here are my tropicals, all looking pretty good

Barbados Cherry



Cherry of the Rio Grande



Lemon Guava

All looking good. My COTRG has caught up to yours. Still very excited about the potential for this tree. If it can survive 12F in east Texas it can survive here.

Lemon guava is starting to branch nicely. Good call on putting the t-stake in now. I posted this 100 pages ago about lemon guava it let me repeat it so you know. The first year that it really starts fruiting heavily it's going to do something that will confuse you. It will flower profusely and set hundreds of fruit. The fruit will then start growing, especially if you thin them. Then, in June, all the fruit will stop growing. The interior leaves on the tree will all start turning yellow and dropping. You will likely lose A LOT of leaves. You'll be convinced that something is wrong and start spraying insecticides, fungicides, and fertilizing. Just ignore it. It does this weird leaf recycle process right in the middle of its fruit production. I have no idea why. It then starts pushing new vegetative growth (with even more flowers) and the fruit starts swelling again and begins to ripen in July/August.

Also I saw a cool video about dwarf Orinoco today that I meant to send you.

Dwarf Orinoco

This is the guy I bought my Veinte Cohol pup from.

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I got the rajapuri and a namwah from him. Both are super healthy and thick trunks. Seems like a good dude and he knows bananas

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Then you've got the real McCoy. He actually cares about the varieties and the money he makes selling pups is negligible. Honestly I have more faith in the authenticy of your rajapuri than mine.

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I put the t-post in yesterday after seeing the size of your tree. That little stake I had in there wasnt going to cut it. Damn thing grows a couple inches a day

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Yep. Wants to be a big floppy spreading mess.

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my Emperor lychee put on a nice flush

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Looks great. I pulled my two year old Sweetheart Lychee out of the ground and put it in a pot hoping to give it some TLC. It just wasn’t working where it was. It was really small and hadn’t grown an inch since I bought it. It summarily died less than a week later. If I do it again I’m going with a larger 15 gallon tree.

I suspect over the coming months I’m going to be removing a few more. I think I’m done with apples and peaches. The Super Hass Avocado I planted back in April looks like shite. Has lost most of its leaves. Meanwhile Oro Negro and Brogdon look great. Not sure if this is normal for Super Hass. May hit up the nursery that sold it to me and see what they think.

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Go time for Rajapuri. Programmed the automatic irrigation on it today.

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following along please be detailed on water, food etc. I’m waiting for a couple rainy days to get all of mine in the ground. Looks like it may rain tomorrow and Tuesday

I have a sprinkler set up in the bed I can easily turn on without having to hose drag.

I put about 6” of top dressing (bark, manure, sand) and underneath it is black soil that stays pretty moist unless we have a midsummer drought





if there’s anything else I should do let me know.

Tree ripened Makok sapodilla came off today. Will give it a couple of days inside to finish.

Backyard Mangos


I tried another sweet tarts. Much better than the first. Also had a Philippine and it was really enjoyable. Wish it was a tad sweeter but I liked the bright tartness

Longan is certainly easier but I agree that it doesn't touch lychee. I will say this: as long as you can protect them from significant freezes lychees LOVE zone 9. They get all the requisite chill hours and flower like crazy.

I would love to grow sweetheart or Hak Ip, but they are all just such gangly lanky trees. Will be Emperor all the way for me.

Well I had my first casualty of overwatering today. I have this Silver Bay Aglaonema that I bought about 5 monhs ago at Lowes and it just started to look odd and it was not taking any water. I had not watered it in almost a month and the soil was still wet. It had some kind of weird soil from Lowes. It was not regular potting mix. It was almost like the texture of Skoal or powder. Just very odd. I should have repotted it earlier but I waited too long

When I broke it down out of the pot, it came out in 3 pieces and two of them were totally rotted. I picked off as much of the dead as I could, sprayed them with hundred percent hydrogen peroxide, then dip them in a peroxide water mix for a couple of minutes. I repotted them in some potting soul mixed with perlite. I also put root stimulater on the root area and mixed a little in the mix. We will see if it survives or dies a horrible death.





I also trimmed up the shells from my new bottle palms and my flame thrower Just carefully took a razer knife and trimmed off the dead skins. That's the first time I've done that on either of those. I have two bottle palms that I bought during the cold weather this year at Home Depot for $20 apiece. They were supposed to be $70 apiece, but they looked bad and now they look awesome. One of my little bottle palms has five healthy fronds and a new spike.





A friend of mine gave me a pup off his spider plant. It laid in the floorboard of my wife's car for about a week before she even reminded me that it was in there. I planted it a few months ago, and it was about the size of a tennis ball. That thing has absolutely taken over and is going crazy. I've been watering it almost every day and it's completely dry the next day so I repotted it this morning. I would say the roots are doing well. Ha ha.







My sago that I transplanted about 6 weeks ago seems to like its new spot. Have some great new growth going on





And last but not least, the lipstick is still doing well. I just wish I had more info about how to care for it. Not a lot of info out there. I am keeping it watered often, I have a drip pan under it and I try to always have a little water in there. I have a spray bottle sitting right beside it and Im spraying it down a time of two everyday. I also have sat it out in the rain in the afternoons to let it get a bath. Just weird how the leaves are doing. I have some stems coming up where there are two or three leaves on there and two of them are absolutely perfect and then the other one will split right down the middle. Just can't figure out what's splitting them. It's not getting a lot of windand no direct sun