Gardening with Tropical Fruit

July 2005

By Gene Joyner, Extension Agent
Palm Beach County Cooperative Extension Service

With our increasingly heavy rainfall most people are receiving most plants should be putting out flushes of growth now on a regular basis. If you forgot to fertilize last month, do so now with a good quality complete fertilizer that has good percentages of micro nutrients like iron, manganese and magnesium.

We’re getting further into our hurricane season, too, so if you have bigger trees and they need to be pruned take care of that chore soon. It’s very unsettling to lose old mature trees in the landscape during hurricanes when they could have been saved if they had been thinned out or reduced in size.

If you’re doing propagation, this is an excellent time of year for grafting, air layering, or rooting cuttings and seeds that have been collected from earlier maturing crops can be planted now, too, to get a new crop of seedlings going for the future.

Many people are complaining that their crops of fruit were a lot less than what they had expected and that can be traced back to damage in some areas from hurricanes last fall. Usually this time of year longans are starting to come in, but many bloomed late and it may be the end of this month or even August before longans are ready to pick. Lychees were also about two weeks late in maturity so don’t expect crops to be on the same schedule this year in the summer as they were last year.

With the frequent rainfall weed competition has become a problem in many landscape plantings and commercial groves, too. Make sure that you are keeping weeds under control by use of heavy mulches wherever practical or regular applications of non-selective herbicides such as Roundup. Young trees in particular can be affected by having large concentrations of weeds up close to the trunk.

It’s a good idea to keep all weed growth out at least to the drip edge of small trees for the first several years to give them time to become well established and to have a large spreading canopy that will hopefully help shade out some weeds as well.

If you’re wanting to add plants to the landscape, this is a good time of year for planting of all types of tropical fruits and they will have the benefit of the rest of our summer rainy season to become well established.

If you have questions about summer care of your tropical fruits, check with fellow members at monthly meetings or contact your local office of the Extension Service.