re: Louisiana Tropical Fruit Gardening - Experiences and Updates

Have not tried the honeyquat yet. It was a very tiny 1g tree when I got it last year. It is easily the most attractive loquat I have I terms of foliage and growth habit.

Just wanted to mention that I was able to find some Barbados cherries while I was in Lake Charles last week. I went to the Home Depot and Lowes there with no success but drove across the bridge before class my last day and the Lowes had several of them.

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2 of my 3 that I recently bare rooted stress dropped several leaves..they yellowed, curled, then browned then dropped. Did not go bare though. …keep them moist, but not wet, keep in dappled shade and wait it out. Mine are actually pushing new leaves already!

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this makes me feel a lot better. I was worried that the pot wasn't draining quickly enough. You can feel some moisture in the soil but it isn't wet/soaked.

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Avocado trees kinda suck. You can look at them wrong and they start wilting

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I received a tree while I was out of town that was sent by mistake. I assume it was from Everglades or Lara Lara since I have ordered from both of those. It says Collin’s on the tag. It’s just budding out but I’ll take pictures when the leaves develop. Any idea what this might be?

Collins is a southern select variety of pawpaw. Could be that.

Jealous

I can totally help you with this but need to see photo of the full tree, including pot size and trunk diameter.

A couple of basics first. A very young/small grafted tree may try to hold a lot of fruit, especially a precocious and prolific mango like Pickering. If the tree is too small, the development of the fruit can actually kill the tree. It takes a ton of sugar to make one mango. If they expend too much energy on that they sometimes can't bounce back.

Now, once you get to a certain size, the advice you see on the mango pages really needs to be evaluated from a container growing perspective. Florida in-ground growers will say no fruit for 2-3 years until the tree is nice and strong and one of the reasons they give is that earlier fruiting will stunt the tree. They want big trees and big harvests.

... but for us, stunting the tree a bit can be a good thing. We want small trees that can be protected from cold and bear a good crop. So in my opinion, I think that once a tree is a good 15g size you can let it hold 0-5 fruit depending on cultivar fruit size. For example, a lemon meringue tree could easily hold 5+ tiny mangos at 15g but a Venus or Beverly could not. Once it is a good 25g size (hopefully the next year), I say let it hold as much as it wants after selective thinning.

I try to only have one mango per panicle. More than that can be splitting resources too thinly on a potted tree. How do we determine which mangos to thin and which to leave? A couple of ways. First, mangos that are going to drop anyway will turn light green, then bright yellow somewhere on the skin. Once you see that a fruit is turning yellow, you can pop it off. After the tree has dropped what it wants to drop, there will still probably be too many mangos on a 25g tree. So on each panicle, it is best to select the largest healthiest looking fruit to keep. If all the mangos on a panicle look equal, cull the ones on the far end of the panicle and leave the one closest to the tree. Nutrients do not have to travel as far this way.

So on a 25g size tree, I am shooting for one mango on every panicle for a productive tree that has many panicles like Pickering. On a 45g tree, I am not thinning fruit at all unless there is some other reason to remove them.

Once you decide to let the tree carry all this fruit, you need to fertilize and water accordingly. I would water a potted tree every 2-3 days during fruit development unless it has been raining. You want to back off the water once the fruit are breaking color in June/July as they start to ripen. Ideally no water the week before you harvest. This will improve flavor. During bloom and fruiting, I give the trees zero nitrogen. The only fertilizer I give it is 0-0-22 langbeinite and maybe a couple of liquid feedings of 0-10-10. You should also be doing a foliar feeding spray every month to keep the leaves healthy. If your tree is small and your primary goal is growth instead of fruit, do not withhold nitrogen. Nitrogen is definitely going to discourage bloom and fruit development but you will still get a harvest. At 15g size, I am not withholding nitrogen. At 25g I am withholding.

Here is my Pickering last year 3 months after I up potted from 15g to 25g. It tried to set 20+ fruit and I let it hold 3.

My dwarf lemon is about a foot high and about 3 feet across. Should I do anything to get more vertical growth?

Stake them to grow up, or maybe prune the ends?

We've got some white sapote set. Hopefully it will hang on to one or two. Young tree.