Gardening with Tropical Fruit

May 2005

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

Many tropical fruits are maturing their crops that were set earlier in the year and if you were fortunate not to have trees damaged by weather conditions you should be enjoying a bountiful harvest. Dry conditions though are keeping some trees from producing their best quality fruit so make sure that if you’re not getting rainfall that the trees are receiving irrigation at least once or twice a week. Hopefully by the end of this month or early June we’ll start our summer rainy season and get heavy thunderstorms several times a week which will eliminate the need for supplemental watering.

This is a good time of year for planting things in the landscape if you have container tropical fruits that haven’t been set out yet and you can buy tropical fruits at local tropical fruit nurseries in various sizes and price ranges.

If you’re doing propagation this time of year, grafting and air layering should be very successful and of course you could start seeds, too, of the fruit that’s starting to mature at this time of year. Make sure that when planting seeds that you use well drained media since soils or media that are too wet often will rot seeds and you will get very low germination.

Some insect and disease activity may be present, particularly in mangoes and avocados. If you have problems you can spray at any time to help prevent loss of large numbers of fruit.

If you didn’t complete pruning earlier in the year or you have unwanted new branches from the spring growth, do pruning as soon as possible so you don’t waste the tree’s energy.
Remember that next month we officially start our hurricane season so especially on big trees complete any pruning that hasn’t been done previously.