re: Louisiana Tropical Fruit Gardening - Experiences and Updates

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Instead of staking or weighting each leg, I had an anchor in the ground in the middle of the greenhouse, and I attached a racket strap around the center support of the roof (where all the braces come together) and tighten it down. This puts enough pressure on the legs that they do not move or blow around.

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I do something very similar, but easier IMO. I fill four 5g home depot buckets with water, affix the lids, then use paracord and run it through the bucket handles and secure them to the frame at each corner of the greenhouse with detachable carabiners. Each corner gets its own bucket. The water provides a bit of thermal mass and you can also remove the lids if we hit a very dry spell to raise internal humidity. On very cold nights, you just pop off the carabiners and fill each bucket with hot bath water and put them back in. It works great and is super easy. I have never had wind overcome the weight of the 5g water buckets.

PSA - Best Deal on Heavy Duty Pots

I use heavy duty injection molded black nursery pots for a lot of reasons. It's been discussed in this thread. If you only want to use beautiful decorative ceramic pots that you can't move then this isn't for you.

This is the best deal I've ever found on 25g pots. Using code WELCOME10, you can get ten 25g pots for $225 flat and free shipping. $22.50/pot is the best you are going to find on injection molded pots unless you have a nursery or wholesale connection. For comparison, 10 pots would normally cost me $375 from my usual Amazon seller. Just placed an order this morning which should get me through the next 5 years or so.

Green Oasis Pots

On pot sizes, 15g is the bare minimum for adult fruit trees. You can use smaller ones but the trees are going to have significant problems. 25g is the minimum for satisfactory fruit production in my experience. I can get 75-100 guavas, 60-80 starfruit, 15-20 atemoyas, 10-12 mangos, 100-200 key limes, etc. from a 25g tree. 45g is the first size where they start behaving comparably to an in ground tree in terms of health and productivity and most can live in 45g forever. A 45g mango will produce plenty of fruit.

25g usually ends up being the ideal size for most home growers and they have the largest dimensions that USPS, Fedex, and UPS will ship. Anything larger requires pallet freight.

If anyone would like some ornamental ginger let me know. I’m about to dig these clumps out and relocate some.







some are pink and some are white. They both smell incredible. I need to get rid of most of this it grows really fast. I also have a couple pots of spiral ginger

That is a really good deal. They are great just for working around the yard too when you don’t really need a cart or wheelbarrow.

The code didn’t work for me, but 250$ plus free shipping is a good deal. Thanks for passing it on.

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Dwarf Hawaiian Mango I just received. I’ve only lost one mango tree so I wanted to get a replacement for it. I think it’s a great looking tree. Exotic Palm Source was the supplier.

OK. This right here is a serious frost risk. It's looking to be a clear windless couple of nights and perfect for frost formation at about 37F. Three degrees is well within a reasonable margin of error. This is especially true for the Northshore, where models consistently underestimate the minimum lows. The models think the lake mitigates cold more than it actually does.

It also looks like it's going to warm up significantly after next week, so I really don't want to deploy the entire setup if I don't have to. I am going to simply cover a few things in pots with frost cloth, maybe add a heat bulb to anything fruiting.

Things worth covering with this forecast:

Mangos
Sugar apple
Starfruit
Sapodilla
Jamaican cherry
Tropical guava
Tropical passionfruit
Miracle fruit
Mamey

No need to cover any of the following with a forecast of 40F and possible light frost:

Loquat
Eugenias
Citrus
Cattley guava
Jaboticaba
Lychee
Longan
White sapote
Atemoya

Will make the final call tomorrow. Don't let laziness undo months/years of your hard work. A good frost won't kill any of these trees but it will definitely burn their foliage off if it hits just right.

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Forecast still calling for lows of 41F and 42F on Saturday and Sunday. I'

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Going to be 49 here. I cant believe its going to be that damn cold here in mid November.

still learning on roselle cultivation. Still no rain so they hadn’t been watered in about 6 weeks. I’d check them every day and they never looked stressed

So either this is triggered by flowering or age or drought they are really starting to break down now and by that I mean literally breaking apart off the main trunks (which are massive)





so I’m giving them a long drink today hopefully that bucks them up some. Still flowering like crazy

fantastic list.
I’m going to protect the Barbados cherry, the Rio Grande and the satsumas just because it’s easy to do so, cloth only.

Lemon will come inside along with the pineapples. And the potted bananas

Hammond

Friday Night
Mostly clear, with a low around 37. Northeast wind around 5 mph.

Saturday
Areas of frost before 7am. Otherwise, sunny, with a high near 63. Northeast wind 5 to 10 mph.

Saturday Night
Partly cloudy, with a low around 41. Northeast wind around 5 mph.