Cox’s Orange Pippin, or one of it’s descendants and Eden crab.
I’ve never got to try goumi, but have been interested. When you mentioned margarita, it really made me what to try it! (Plus the fruits look so cool!)
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Blueberries
Blackberries
Satsumas
Lemons
Oranges
Figs
Apples
Watermelon
Other melons
Squash(including pumpkins one of my favorites)
Tomatoes
New here
Bananas
Pawpaws(apart from the wild ones we never beat the critters to eat)
Pineapple Guava
Most problematic
Pears (fireblight got them all)
Grapes(never grow much)
Nanking Cherries(grow well most of year then wimp out in summer)
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What kind of grapes? I’d expect muscadines to do well in your area. They’re generally very vigorous and heat tolerant.
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None are Muscadines. Niagra, Red Globe, Reliance, Einset and Thomcords.
We have 5 acres of wild Bullet and Fox muscadines and the old patriarch of our neighboring farm brings us crates and crates of Scuppernongs every year…lol
The best fruits I’ve ever grown are:
The Honey series nectarines: Lite, Blaze, Royale, and Diva
Flavor Supreme and Flavor King pluots
Orangered and Summer Delight apricots
Summer Muscat grape, incredible Muscat flavor
Black Madeira, Ondata, Black Manzanita figs
Morus Nigra mulberry
Sweetcrisp blueberry
Valley Sweet peach
I grew stone fruit, apples and peaches in Amarillo for 30 years. Fruit quality was good but I thought I could do better. So, in 2000 I moved to central CA, the heart of the stone fruit industry in CA. Production was fabulous there but quality was still hit and miss. Then one day after attending the weekly Dave Wilson fruit tasting in Reedley I was driving home and bit into one of the few fully ripe peaches that I found at those tastings. Usually the fruit was commercial ripe, ie hard and green. I was about to stop at my first right turn and was slapped in the mouth by the best tasting piece of fruit I’d ever eaten. I didn’t find that flavor again often in CA but did in my greenhouse after moving back to Texas. The Honey series nectarines grown with a bit of water stress have it in spades if I get lucky.
Now I’ve mostly moved on the healthier fruits with less sweetness. But still hope to grow a few of the premium fruits.
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Thanks Vivaldi, good info. Here it grows great! I just took some old screenshots from years ago:
My baby Flambeau plant in late June of 2020:
Next season, the same plant in May 2021
And it already began to flower and fruit!
This is the same plant today in Feb 2025
It is a very vigorous grower. I can’t say it was slow…
They are known to start producing when extremely small and young! So plant size is not that bad anyway.
And Flambeau is simply less hardy and vigorous than normal varieties too, as variegated plants often are…
It seems pretty bombproof here with freezes, sodden soil, gale force winds and mild drought
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My villarica strawberry, when I thought I had cracked the code. But none of the fruit ripened and it got too much drought stress and declined to the point now I think it’s dead. Most of the branches died back now just a few leaves holding on
June-august is the challenge here
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And that is your best plant?
I think Villarica Strawberry is just a named wildtype cultivar. Maybe more cold-tolerant but definitely not heat-toletant I think…
What are you typical summer highs and winter lows?
Do you find that other fruits struggle with your high temperature fluctuations in your climate or mainly just Ugni?
Avocado and ugni are the only ones that really struggle in the summer, honey berries too but I expect that. I’d say June-august is mostly around 90, but the low is like 78 or something. Winter low this year was 24 last also. But three ago we had a 15* night
My best plant I don’t have a photo of, but my flambeau is also alive. I have two normal no named ones. One behind my greenhouse in mostly shade is my best plant tho. This one was the only one so far that has fruited, but it seems to have killed it haha
I’m pretty close to Gknight, but I’m inland while he’s on an island, so my climate is a bit more harsh.
The summer high is usually almost 100 F. If we get a drought anytime between July and early September temperatures will go +100 F, but most years it stays humid enough that highs are in the 90s F. +90 F weather starts in June and continues through September. Annual lows on average are right at 15 F, but there’s a lot of variation. This year was 10 F, a few years ago was 22 F, and a few years before that, 2018 I think, was 2 F.
But our winters are also very warm, generally speaking it gets above 70 F at least a few days every month, even in winter. Spring and Fall months usually have a few days above 80 F.
I get about 55 inches of rain each year, Gknight probably gets a bit more. The YouTuber Millennial Gardener, who lives about an hour south of us, gets +60 inches of rain a year.
I’m right at 60” for the year. Unfortunately I don’t get much when I need it, even though summer is “rainy season” it hasn’t been for the last few, which means constant irrigation.
Interesting, I can see why plants will fry during your droughts if you can’t water them constantly…
Is most of that annual rainfall due to hurricanes/storms? You get more inches of rain than I do in Europe. I think my rainfall is more evenly distributed
The lack of cool nighttime temperatures is what does them in if they survive the winter. My summer daytime highs are routinely over 90 but temps drop to the mid-50s at night, and my Chilean guavas are doing great. They were unfazed by two weeks at 100+ this last summer. It was in the mid-60s at night during that heatwave though. A lot of plants from the Andes and other high-elevation tropical locations need the drop in temperatures at night for their metabolism to recover otherwise they grow themselves to death, or at least that’s how I’ve seen some people try to explain it.
Mine have tripled in size in the last year. I think they can be relatively fast if they’re happy. I have not found them to be particularly drought-sensitive either.
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For plants that can’t handle our summers, it’s more the heat, humidity, and sun that fry them rather than drought. I’m thinking of currants, gooseberries, honeyberry, raspberries, and sweet cherries. Or disease and fungal problems because of the heat and humidity, such as stone fruits, apples, most pears, and European grapes and hazelnuts.
We actually get pretty consistent summer rain most years, and a lot of it. Late June through early September is our thunderstorm season. Most years, there’s a steady stream of moisture coming off the Gulf of Mexico and passing over the eastern US, the South especially. Only later in mid September does the Azores high build up enough for a high pressure dome to settle over the southeastern US and things dry out a bit. Mostly, that’s mid to late September to late October. During that period, hurricanes can be a major source of rain, yes.
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Is there such a thing as a map that can show someone the bad regions for a given fruit? I understand each cultivar may be unique in its defenses against disease pressure and heat and drought etc but it may be a good rule of thumb resource
Wow, that’s fascinating!
So really it’s the humidity, clouds, and elevation that’s the root problem it sounds like. The nights just don’t cool off much here during the summer since we’re at low elevation and the air is just full of water–which has a great heat capacity and which seriously reduces radiative cooling to the night sky. Tellingly, we only see the stars well in fall and winter, not in summer. If light’s not making it down from space at night, infrared ain’t going to be making it out to space.
Metabolism makes sense. It could be that they need cooler temperatures for a certain state of the metabolic process or for breaking down waste/by-products, or just for respiration.
Welp, I’m not sure I can act on that information, but it’s good to know regardless. Thanks!
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Plant metabolism aside, the constant warmth and moisture also encourages pathogens, possibly to an extent that overcomes any plant defenses.
We’re essentially under a high-pressure ridge all summer and have a cold ocean current nearby, so nights are cloudless and cool fast. You can always spot the out-of-state tourists in summer here since they go out at night wearing only t-shirts and shorts and then complain about the cold.
For some plants you can experiment with grafting onto species that tolerate your conditions better. For example, people in Australia will graft species from Mediterranean-climate western Australia onto rootstock of their eastern counterparts, making them much more tolerant of irrigation and summer rainfall.
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It has been my experience when people tell me they hate apricots or I taste apricots from other people that say they have great apricots and at best they are kinda edible to me. I produce,and yes I’m bragging,apricots that people when looking at them from a short distance tell me they have never seen peaches so orange,yellow,and red blushed and I tell them those are my apricots. Several come close to just under baseball size. But what gets them is when they taste them the look on their face is priceless. Too many people have not tasted a good or exceptional apricot. Their apricots rarely get over 16 brix and almost all of mine are 20-28 brix. I’m saying all this because I believe apricots are better than peaches,nectarines,and plums,its just very few have tasted a great apricot and I have friends that have grown apricots for decades that have never had a great apricot and that is because they take very particular feeding and pruning different than other stone fruit.
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Very good to know, maybe I will begin dousing them in the evenings this upcoming summer to help mimic this.