re: Louisiana Tropical Fruit Gardening - Experiences and Updates

Unlike oranges and mandarins, lemons (and limes) will flower and set fruit year round if conditions are warm enough. My key lime that winters indoors basically flowers and fruits all year to some degree. My Meyer lemon was flowering this past December because it was so warm.

Takes about 8-9 months to ripen depending on variety and weather conditions. In our climate they typically are winter fruiting, meaning you harvest in winter. They flower in the spring.

Also, show us pics.

Yep. A 5 gallon bucket of warm water under the cover next to the tree is infinitely better than covering alone.

I'll put pics up later this evening.

When you get a good crop of citrus that you can keep, what do you do with the extras?

When I get to the point of harvesting the lemons hopefully we have more than we can eat before they go bad.

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I should have a passion fruit arriving today.

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I keep toying around with passionfruit. I don't really like the common purple edulis varieties like purple possum or Frederick because I find them too sour. The sweet tropical cultivars are harder to grow here and not winter hardy. The one I'm considering is Parama Red or Gold, which are edulis varieties that allegedly have better sweetness.

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dwarf banana early next week

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Let me know what cultivar. I may be able to help with that. Very big difference between dwarf namwah (recommended) and dwarf Cavendish (not recommended) for instance. The bananas are a challenge to fruit in containers. If it is fruit you want an not just great foliage, I'd recommend the Banana Fuel fertilizer on Amazon.

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I have a key lime I bought last year and want to add a lime. Any lime suggestions?

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Key lime is the only lime I recommend. Persian limes are readily available at any grocery store if you need lots of juice and the flavor on key lime is considerably better. The new hotness on the citrus market is Kaffir/Makrut lime, which they have recently re-branded as "Keiffer" lime because people are sensitive pussies and don't want to utter a Muslim slur word. These stupid kaffir limes are everywhere this year and I cannot understand why anyone is buying them. The fruit is not even eaten, you use the skin/rind for zest and cook with the leaves. Unless you are trying to make some very specific authentic Thai dishes with lime leaves, this tree has basically no purpose for you. If you must have a lime in addition to your key lime, look at Palestinian sweet lime. Has lime flavor but also sweetness.

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Do the guavas (or any other fruit for that matter) tolerate a good amount of shade? I have a north facing balcony and a north facing patio that I’ve been looking to put some container plants on. I know a lot of these tropical fruit bearing plants are understory plants in their natural environment. The balcony gets a couple hours of morning sunlight, but is otherwise pretty shaded. The patio can get close to 6 hours the further away from the house I get.

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Loquat will tolerate nearly full shade. Guavas are tough as nails and will grow and even fruit shyly in the shade, but the quality is not good. They don't get sweet. 6 hours of Louisiana sun is equivalent to about 10 hours of normal American sun. Put all that tropical stuff out there in the full sun and give them plenty of water. When temperature is over 90F, all fruit trees are better in the shade. I try to get mine about 4 hours of morning light on the hottest summer days and shade the rest of the day. The intense afternoon sun at 97F is more stressful than beneficial to tropical fruit trees. But if I had to choose between your balcony and the patio, it's the patio hands down. All tropical fruits will develop more sugars with more light, so even your shade grown loquat will not be as good as one in the sun.

Almost anything will do pretty well in mixed sun/shade throughout the day. Even citrus do great under oak trees in dappled light.

Thanks for the info. I think I’m going to try a nagami kumquat just behind the patio. I’m debating putting that in ground since it should be fairly cold hardy after a few years. I definitely want to try a guava and I’m intrigued by the Barbados cherry. My wife loves sour fruit, so that seems like a good fit.

I think I’m learning that citrus doesn’t love full sun here. I have 3 trees on south wall of the house and they were all doing significantly worse than a couple trees on the north side of the house that still gets a decent amount of sun.

Any idea how long Feijoa takes to fruit? I have 2 shrubs on the same south wall that are about 2-3 years in ground. Hoping for fruit soon.

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Thanks for the info. I think I’m going to try a nagami kumquat just behind the patio. I’m debating putting that in ground since it should be fairly cold hardy after a few years. I definitely want to try a guava and I’m intrigued by the Barbados cherry. My wife loves sour fruit, so that seems like a good fit.

I think I’m learning that citrus doesn’t love full sun here. I have 3 trees on south wall of the house and they were all doing significantly worse than a couple trees on the north side of the house that still gets a decent amount of sun.

Any idea how long Feijoa takes to fruit? I have 2 shrubs on the same south wall that are about 2-3 years in ground. Hoping for fruit soon.

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Nagami is a very very vigorous grower and the most cold hardy citrus (that you actually want to eat). Take a look at Meiwa though. I've grown both. The meiwa is not as vigorous or as cold hardy, but the taste is 5X better than Nagami. All kumquats are prone to zinc deficiency so keep an eye on leaf color.

Guava and Barbados cherry are easy. Just protect from the cold, large pot, and plenty of sun. People's heads spin when you show up somewhere with ripe ruby supreme.

Is your feijoa flowering and not setting fruit or not flowering at all?

Wow. You were not kidding about her predilection for tart fruit. You should really do a barbados cherry. That's such an easy one if you like a tangy fruit.

Also what were your low temps this winter that the meiwa survived? That's the kind of real data we need in this thread.

Let me get back to you on the feijoa. My in-laws have a huge mature tree that fruits every year. Do you know if yours is a named variety? The vast majority are not self fertile. But that wouldn't stop flowering.

That's really good info. Meiwa is usually listed for 28F. That's also a mature tree you have. No way my 2nd year tree would survive that.

If it's Almost Eden I can almost guarantee you that it's a self fertile variety (probably Coolidge). Even the self fertile ones get much better fruit set with more than 1 tree. I'll get back to you about fruiting maturity.

The first 2 images are the lemon trees. I can remember which is the Lisbon or Meyer. The big stick is an Anna apple tree.