Pineapple guava

Have you tried air layering them?

The only plants that I’ve tried to air layer were Mulberry and Fig,with the latter being successful. Brady

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Plant and water them like Citrus if you want good fruit production :slight_smile:

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If you are interested in premium fruit quality, the plants at nurseries are not your best bet. I would expect most of them to have mediocre fruit. I am growing Nazmets, Coolidge and unnamed seedlings of both and would rate the fruit as only fair compared to some other modern cultivars.

I’ll ask Pat Schafer about bulk sales of feijoa if he is at the CRFG meeting in Santa Rosa tomorrow morning.

Last year I briefly discussed grafting with Mark Albert. He has good success grafting feijoa if certain parameters are followed. According to Mark, if you just graft a random scion to a random branch it will probably fail. However if you have a seedling that has formed with a single central leader (as opposed to a bush form), the seedling can be decapitated and grafted over fairly reliably.

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Here’s what Mark Albert said about grafting in an email a few years ago. It ties in with what danchappell says:

"Grafting is difficult, though pretty easy if you follow the rules, though this is late for So. Calif. Due to heat, and the scions are too advanced. Feb – Mar is better for you. The rules are quite rigid.

"You’d need to buy feijoa seedlings at any nursery with trunks or major low scaffolds the exact size of the scions. One to five scions can be placed on one stock. All other growth must be eliminated, though one small nurse scaffold may help, which is true in all evergreen grafting. Young plants in pots are successful, while older plants in pots are not successful, I think because the roots rot when the top is removed.

"You cannot top work Feijoa to a part of an existing plant. They just don’t have the push to make the graft take, except maybe a crown sucker of an existing tree, but at some point the entire tree must be cut off to force the graft to continue to grow.

"These are the Feijoa propagation rules. The fact that they are so difficult to propagate explains why you are not able to easily buy 20 different California proven cultivars of Feijoa anywhere.

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I disagree with this. Air-layering of Feijoa has a 100% success rate and is what La Verne uses for Nazemetz (Coolidge is propagated by seed).

Feijoa is still marketed by retail nurseries as an ornamental plant and rarely as a fruit.

appreciate it dan.if u can also get his email? i tried two emails and got no response.maybe my email is ending up in his spam box lol.

Had a nice chat with Patrick Schaefer today at the exchange. He said each grafted plant is a 3 year process because seedling take 2 years to grow thick enough to graft on, and then another year to heal before he sells them. That (and the scarcity of the clones he grafts) explains the high price. I asked if I could place a larger order with him and he said he has a limited amount of rootstock available, so even if demand increased it would take him 3 years to catch up.

The varieties I took home are Albert’s Pride, Albert’s Supreme, Moore, Jackson, W-7 and 8 Ball. I’m still in search of Edenvale Supreme, Edenvale Late, Albert’s Joy and Abadaba. I sure wish there were more people propagating Feijoa in California!

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Which exchange?

CRFG scion exchange in Santa Rosa

http://crfg-redwood.org/events/scion-exchanges/

In addition to the points jbclem quoted above, key points Pat Schafer mentioned today were that matching scion to rootstock diameter is critical. He also keeps the tape on for at least one year to maintain some additional structural support for the graft. Splinting would not be a bad idea especially if the plant may be disturbed by high wind or critters.
He also mentioned the fact that feijoa is one of the only fruits which have readily available rootstock relatively cheap commercially available year round from our local nurseries.

He grafts about 50 feijoa plants a year primarily as a hobby.

Mark Albert told me that they are moving toward using longer scions. He cut an example for me of what he feels today is the perfect length scion. It was approximately 8" long. He cut off all of the leaves but noted that the petioles should remain on the stem. I assume this is to avoid damaging the tiny buds. I counted 20 buds on the prepared scion.

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Air-layering is a 6 month process in my environment and does not involve scion wood.

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Joe you must have been the guy who was happily running back and forth to the car with feijoas while I was chatting with Pat!

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Haha, yes that was me! I did my best to clean him out.

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how many feijoas did pat have in pots for sale at the convention?

Maybe 20 plants or so

What style grafting is Pat Schafer using, whip grafts, cleft grafts, or something else?

cleft graft

is it reccomended to have coolidge to cross polinate with nazmetz?