re: Louisiana Tropical Fruit Gardening - Experiences and Updates

OK, so you're zone 9a like me but likely with significantly cooler lows over the winter on average.

Recommendations in order for a newbie to tropicals:

1) Lemon cattley guava (Psidium cattleianum var. littorale). This does not taste like a lemon at all. It gets the name from the yellow color of the fruit. Very sweet and tart bite sized fruits with a hint of the tropical guava flavor. Prolific and will bear tons of fruit in containers. Hardy to 22F, so it will have to be a deep freeze to kill it if you forget to protect. You could even put it in the ground if you are willing to cover and heat during the winter, but it will try to get very tall. Almost no pest pressure due to its tough waxy leaves. This is the yellow variant of "strawberry guava," which is a smaller red fruit with a more astringent taste. You want the yellow not the red. This tree is almost impossible to screw up.

2) Kary starfruit (Averrhoa carambola var. Kary): begins bearing at a young age and can fruit in a 3 gallon container. Put it in a 15gal and it will quickly grow into a 6-7 foot tree that takes pruning well. Kary is the smallest starfruit cultivar that also tastes good and does not really need cross pollination. Starfruit are probably the most prolific trees I can think of. One small tree will feed your whole neighborhood. They need a soil pH around 6 and cold protection. They will stop growing at about 65F and they will start yellowing and dropping leaves in the 50s. This is not the tree dying. They just look ugly in cold weather and want full sun with high heat and humidity. Will not survive freezing temps. They also HATE wind. Leaves will burn if exposed to too much strong wind. They are drama queens that love to defoliate with the slightest stress but this somehow does not stop them from producing massive amounts of fruit. Do not choose starfruit if you have kidney disease. They have 2 different toxins in them that are only a problem if you have kidney dysfunction and eat a massive amount of fruit.

3) Ruby supreme guava (Psidium guajava var. Ruby x Supreme): this may be my favorite tree and I feel like I am squarely in the minority in this opinion. Guava is my favorite fruit and ruby is fantastic. Beautiful foliage, handles heat like a champ, not fussy at all about soil conditions or quality. Almost impossible to overwater. These are tough trees. Mid 20s for any significant period of time will cause heavy damage if not kill it. On the Northshore, people grow them in ground and they return from the roots every year. They do not fruit. It needs a couple of years without dying to the ground to produce. The fruit are huge and if you let it ripen on the tree all the way to yellow they are unbelievable. The shelf life of a perfectly ripe guava is like 1 day. You simply aren't ever going to get this experience unless you travel to the tropics or grow it yourself. Ruby supreme is a magnet for mealy bugs which love to attack the leaves. I have every pesticide known to man including some crazy commercial stuff but the only thing that controls the mealy bugs is a 50/50 mix of isopropyl alcohol and water in a spray bottle. It dries them out. Their waxy coating shields them from pretty much everything else except natural predators. Bonus: Louisiana does not have the carribean fruit fly so our guavas do not get worms in the fruit. I bag em anyway to prevent squirrels and birds from meddling and also to catch the ripe yellow fruit when they fall off the stem. I only put this at #3 because I already had another guava at #1. If I had to pick 2 off this list it would be the 2 guavas for quality of fruit and ease of cultivation.

If you like more sour fruit barbados cherry is easy in a container. I just don't like tart fruit and don't grow it.

If you want something in the ground then feijoa is the answer. If you only want one of them, you have to get a self-fertile variety. That limits you to Coolidge, improved Coolidge, and Unique. Hardy to around 5-10F.

The Oliver loquat is a fantastic small fruit and the tree is extremely cold hardy in the ground. The fruits however are not. They flower in winter so you need to protect the fruit from freezes. Great foliage.

I am a fairly ambitious gardener so I'll try anything, but things I would not recommend for a newbie in LA would be the following: lychee, longan, mango, sugar apple, custard apple, cherimoya, atemoya, mangosteen, white sapote, black sapote, and ultra tropicals like durian. All of these are possible with the right setup but you really have to dive into soil chemistry, micronutrients, watering practices, cold exposure, hand pollination, selective pruning, fungal prevention, etc. Start with something bulletproof and when you understand how container growing really works step up.