Try soaking it in a bucket of water for a few hours to let it rehydrate. You can add some peroxide to the water to nock down some of the fungal mat. It looks like the potting mix is getting hydrophobic and the soaking will help.
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Thank you for the suggestion.
This is the soil of my starfruit. It’s just entirely covered in whatever fungus this is and all of it is crumbly and dry. I don’t understand how this fungus could’ve grown if it was dry and just overtaken everything I’m at a bit of a loss what to do here I’m taking off all of it that crumbles off, but I think I need to soak it.
I just realized when it was dropping all of its leaves this winter (I got it last October,) and I finally decided to take it out of its 3 gallon that it came in and up pot it, it looked like this and the root ball was so dry and crumbly, and I thought that it was all sand. I really thought that they just use a heavy sand mixture because there wasn’t all the accumulated white clumps that look more like fungus. it clearly came with this problem and I just didn’t identify it properly when I up potted it and now it’s probably too late for me to get any recourse from the nursery. That explains why none of my other container plants have it when I up potted a whole bunch of citrus at the same time using the exact same ingredients. I’m a little scared for this to spread to my other containers.
Update Well, all the fungus laiden soil just crumbled away. I decided to bare root it, spray it and douse it with a bleach solution that I had on hand and then repot it in all new soil. We’ll see what happens. I am going to contact the nursery, though I doubt they’ll do anything. And now I’m off to the woods to get rid of this insane infected soil. I really wish that I had known when I switched it out this past winter that that was all fungus that was making it dry and look like sand. It wasn’t nearly as white, but it was dense and crumbly. live and learn consequences of being new to all this. It’s a pretty tough plant that seems to just keep trying to live, I think it’ll be OK. The question is whether or not the fungus comes back
The fungus itself isn’t actually harming the plant. However, it’s probably using a substantial amount of water and competing with the tree because of it. Removing it all and repoting the plant should solve the issue. I wouldn’t worry too much about it spreading to your other potted plants, as long as you don’t share soil, it won’t leave the container.
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Thank you for your opinion! I think that seems very accurate. A very hungry fungus.
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Keep it well watered and it should be fine.
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Definitely clip them, star fruit trees will flower so much that when they are small they can die, at the very least they will be set back a lot. Also the fruit will be of low quality. Give it a year or two and you will have so many fruit you’ll not know what to do with them.
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