re: Louisiana Tropical Fruit Gardening - Experiences and Updates

Very nice. For 14 bucks you can take a flyer on a guava. It might be fantastic. If not, replace with with something better. Just get it well staked and prune that thing so the branches are going where you want them. They grow like weeds and are tough as nails for everything but cold.

Nagami is also tough as nails and can take a bunch of sun. But I have yet to find the citrus that likes full Louisiana July/August sun. Even my key lime, the most tropical citrus on earth, starts to struggle in that intense heat. The ideal situation is to plant in full sun and cover with shade cloth for July and August but that's a pain in the arse. I'd rather just plant somewhere with 4-5hrs of sun.

Try ordering canned and freeze dried versions of these fruits online. The only thing I ever grew for which I hadn't tasted the actual fruit was guava, and it was a massive success.

Lychee is an unreal flavor. Sweet, subacid, roselike aromaticity.

If shopping for key limes, avoid the thornless variety. They don't grow as well.

Dwarf Cavendish is fine if all you want is summer foliage. Not satisfactorily cold tolerant. Mine survived winter with protection so I should get fruit this year. Will update on the quality when/if it happens.

Yes, you can overwinter the DC in the greenhouse. It's just usually difficult to get decent fruit from a potted banana. They are easy to protect in ground, though.

Get a thorny key lime. I've done both and the thorned ones are more vigorous and less disease prone.

The Florida's Best book is awesome. That's how you figure out that something like barbados cherry or atemoya is totally possible and that something like durian or mangosteen probably isn't. I love that book.

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You really went all in

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Have I said how much I missed having my homestead back in MS when I was in Alaska? Alot of what I ordered is small (1 gallon), but I'm patient. Thanks for the video links. I will check them out.

Still waiting on another key lime and komquat. I should be able to find them locally in a month or so.

New mango varieties today…

Two new varieties out of SoFL from Truly Tropical.

Lemon-esh is a sibling of Lemon Zest and is said to have better disease resistance and taste like Lemon Starburst candy

Monte is an unknown hybrid that apparently tastes like a cross between peach and passion fruit.

Will likely be 2 years before these bear fruit.



For those who wonder why I endorse Pickering. Look at the fruit set on this 2yo tree.

These new ones are typical for newly grafted trees. They are in 1 gallon pots and about 12-15” tall. They typically wait for them to flush at least twice to ensure they are viable. I suspect they’ll double in size by this time next year.

The Pickering in the second pic is a tree I planted last year from a 7g pot. It’s now about 4 feet by 4 feet.

Welp, first rage inducing setback of the season just happened. I had a huge 15ft tall namwah banana in the ground (seen in OP follow up posts) and even despite the record cold I was able to save about 9 feet of trunk. A lot of the height was the leaves so I only lost about 12 inches of trunk total at the very top. So now that it's warmed up, the pups and all my other bananas are pushing leaves but not the 9 foot stalk. This was supposed to produce fruit this summer. So I get out a ladder and the only thing it's pushing is not a leaf, it's about 1cm of inflorescence stalk. Then it stopped pushing. That dead 12 inches at the very top contained the flower. So all my protection was wasted on the big trunk.

The good news is that I also protected the pups and the largest one is the same size as the mother was last June. So I'm about 3 months ahead of last year. This should cause flowering in November and I can better protect as the freezes come.

Here's what I'm left with:




Here's where the mother stem was back in June 2024. You can see it behind the fence on the left side in the background:



Luckily, I had one of equal size in a pot and that one came inside for the winter, so at least I will get some namwahs from last year's plants:

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Aight this is cool as shite. Glad I opened this thread.

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Careful. Next thing you know you're buying something called an atemoya off Etsy from some guy named Javier at 2AM.