A: Southern Louisiana? About as hot and humid as it gets.
I’m guessing that disease pressures are intense.
Probably a surprising number of chill hours. Maybe 500?
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@mamuang
I did my first grafting this year on other trees. I’m just having fun and learning. Time will tell if it works out for me.
I will certainly have a lot of wood to play with between all my little trees.
I got 14 grafts from 9 different varieties take on one Pluot tree I have. Plums, pluot, nectarine, and cherry. Fruit cocktail. Over a foot of growth on many of them already.
And a few cut thumbs!
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Don’t even start with the humidity.
Yes lots of issues here…both pests and disease. It is what it is. One reason I am posting on this lovely forum is no one down here really tries growing much of any fruit besides blueberries and citrus, though citrus is further south from me generally.
Even the local state horticulturalist isn’t much help. We are many hundreds of miles from any commercial orchards.
Chill varies greatly. Calculation of chill isn’t a hard science. I have my own weather station so I have the data to play with. If you use any system that accumulates negative chill for warm winter temps, I can get an overall negative chill number, so that doesn’t work. If I ignore warm temps and use the Utah modified method (0.5, 1, 0.5 degrees for different temp ranges), I did more than 500 this year, but by the behavior of my few older trees, that number is questionable.
My flavor grenade pluot bloomed well (only 2nd year in the ground), but my weeping Santa Rosa Plum, Sweet Treat Pluerry, and older Pluot didn’t bloom well and flowered over a long time, so they didn’t accumulate chill well.
Then to make things worse this year, a March 20th 27 degree freeze knocked all the set fruit on those trees off. No fruit.
Those three trees have just started producing fruit last year with 2 dozen each.
So with the aforementioned plums I have more to play with while others aren’t working out.
I didn’t mention a plum espalier I just started!
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So after much waiting I finally got my 3 plum trees. 10 days in a box this time of year is not ideal, but they arrived still dormant and in great shape.
Much thanks to Raintree Nursery and their folks as they answered all of my many questions quickly and went beyond the norm I’ve experienced.
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An update on my 3 in ‘one hole’ planting as mentioned above.
Funnily enough the purple gage was supposed to be the least vigorous of the three so I gave it the best sun position. Of course at this small size they are all getting the same sun. It is growing much more vigorously than the other two. I’ve since pruned it back to be the same height.
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