Psidium longipetiolatum (mountain cherry guava)

Yes i do! :grin:

The true Psidium Longipetiolatum is really great! Sweet with lemony taste, big size and the best keeping qualities among araças.

Curious if anyone else on here has had success growing these?

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The only person in this thread who hasn’t updated in awhile on the status of this species is @SnacksFromPlants, but I think they are a little colder than I am, so wouldn’t be surprised if it’s died for them.

I noticed that Wanderlust doesn’t seem to carry it anymore, so I’m guessing they decided it’s not hardy enough for here.

Here are a couple photos from earlier today of my two sad little trees, the second one still has green bark but no buds grew this year:


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Sadly, I’d expect we’re at least a hundred years’ of breeding away from having any kind of zone 8 hardy psidium. Zone 9 folks get to have all the fun…

I have some psidium cattleyanum var littore seedlings, and will probably be getting some p. longipetiolatum in the near future, maybe p. robustum if I can find a good source. I have no expectation of being able to keep them outside unprotected, but, like my satsumas, so long as they can get through winter with a bit of protection, I’m happy. Since they’re virtually pest-free and super easy to care for during the growing season, I don’t mind having to put in some effort helping them out during the winter.

Maybe sometime down the road I’ll play around with crossing those species. Who knows, perhaps some F2s will be more hardy.

I have tried growing P Longipetiolatum, P Cattleianum, P Robustum and a couple of other Psidiums in zone 8a/8b for several years now.

Compared to Feijoa, Guabiju, cold hardy citrus and even Uvaia they can give you a good abundant harvest now and again, but all in all are quite difficult to grow into fruiting, I have found.

The plants survive pretty good usually and that is why they are deems hardy to -6 C. But the flowering and fruiting is much more delicate than other semi-exotic or sub tropical species. The fruits will ripen very late here (after Christmas until March) and will shrivel up and turn brown at any kind of frost. The plant will survive, but you won’t get any harvest. Also, after a winter with temperatures around -5 C the plants will survive, but have so much damage that they will not fruit the following summer. All in all a hardy plant, but don’t wait for it to fruit… and ripen….

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Good to know.

We’ll see how mine behave. I don’t have much tolerance for plants that need lots of effort but don’t return much, so if I have trouble getting them to fruit their future won’t be so bright. That said, I suspect I get far more summer heat than you do. Maybe that’ll help, maybe not.

I guess I’ll find out.

Mine is still in a pot. Been to scared to put it out. Might give it a spot on the greenhouse in ground. We’ll see. It did defoliate but then re-leafed so I was happy about that.

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I am shocked this doesn’t show clearer signs of freeze damage, but I’m assuming it’ll just be delayed. This is earlier today, after about 60 hours below freezing and more than 48 hours below 25°F, with a low of 14.7°F:

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It did die back almost to ground level, but is already starting a spring flush, a little ahead of feijoa in terms of when it started budding out:

I’m starting to believe this thing might actually do fine here if we can string together a couple winters without a freeze in the teens (which in recent decades has actually been common). Would love to see what a 2"+ trunk looked like after a freeze like that one.

And to be clear, this was the only severe freeze event we had over the winter, but it was a pretty severe freeze:

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