What pineapple guava cultivars produce good fruit in the U.S. south?

So since I had so many, I took the pulp out and


froze a lot of the fruit. I also saw a New Zealand blog where they took the skins and made a simple syrup. Threw them into a pot with equal amounts water and sugar, filtered it back out. It’s great. My wife dislikes the fruit, but loves the simple syrup.

I think the filtered skins can be used in baking as well. I’ll give that one a shot…

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Great thread!

I’m in SoCal Z10.

Considering ordering the following varieties (mostly based on availability + research).

Would welcome any feedback or advice or warnings against specific ones.

Marion
Anatoki
Kaiteri
Waingro
Takaka

Thank you!

Hey, there is actually a California feijoa thread as well. I’m not sure how 10a works since the lack of chilling hours can reduce fruiting.
If you only get 1,Takaka is self fertile and produces well.

If you’re getting multiple, most of those are good. Marion is known to have some empty fruit unless it’s pollinated well.
In fruiting, Kaiteri, anatoki, takaka are early.
Marion is in the middle, and waingoro is late…

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Sorry about that - I couldn’t find one about CA except for one with a single post with no responses. LMK if I should move my Q and your response there. Happy to do it.

And also thank you for the feedback.

I’m wondering if I should reduce it to 2 early, 2 mid and that’s it for now. Or maybe 2 early and 2 late.

Let me look up some options and post back in a bit.

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I checked and it was actually for the Pacific Nw, not So Cal at all, so I guess this thread is ok…

Let us know what varieties you choose!

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Thanks!

I think I’m leaning towards just the early ones for now. Though I did post about some scions I obtained and want to try grafting:

Has anyone here ordered seedlings from OneGreenWorld? I’m debating whether to get the 4.5in seedlings or the 1 gal. 1 gal probably makes more sense?

I got scions for
Albert’s Supreme
Lickver’s Pride
Marjane

Would you or anyone here know if these are early/mid/late varieties? Depending on that, I can decide the final list I want to buy. (i.e. if 2 of these are late, then I don’t need to buy another late variety but if only 1 of them is late and the other 2 are early, then I probably need to buy a late companion.

Thanks for all the advice!

Ended up going with:
Anatoki
Kaiteri
Takaka

and 3 seedlings to try grafting on.

Thans for the advice @manfromyard and for the great thread everyone!

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Oh yeah

Albert’s Supreme is late…
Lickver’s Pride is Mid-late afaik…

I don’t know of anyone who grows Marjane unfortunately…

I usually get my seedlings from fruitwood as they are a bit cheaper to the east coast, and they usually have a lot of scionwood of other fruits that I have…

But they should balance out the early varieties that you bought nicely!

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Good to hear! Do you usually graft onto the “seedling plugs” or onto 1gal seedlings? I’ve never done grafts for pineapple guavas and saw the other thread mentioning they are a bit finicky.

Last time I planted 1 years, then cleft grafted them the next year.

With the 1 year plants this year, I will be trying veneers which seem to work for others…

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Good to know thanks. I’m waiting for my orders to arrive with bated breath :slight_smile:

Excited to get these growing and grafted and taste some fruit in a year or two hopefully.

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Do feijoa grafts take a long time to push growth? I field grafted a bunch in mid Feb and a couple are pushing growth but most have yet to push a bud. However the grafts haven’t failed still green to a scratch test

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I treat mine like Citrus (sub tropical evergreens), so I only graft between 70 and 85 degrees F. So I would really start grafting this weekend for my 8B.

When I did them earlier, they just sat like yours. The grafts don’t really take till it warms up, unlike my persimmon, pears, and deciduous fruit…

But that depends on where you are. Sweet spot seems to be 70-80 before the heat starts hard…

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And do you only graft directly to young saplings or have you tried grafting to younger branches of existing (older) trees too? There was a bunch of advice on the other thread on fejioa grafting that seemed to indicate that grafting only works when done onto young seedlings. Though maybe I’m reading too much into that. I’d love to be able to create a Frankentree to keep trying new varieties instead of grafting to a seedling each time.

I’m grafting only onto my existing shrubs, they are 3 years old unnamed variety. Just wanted to add some named cultivars to my seedlings

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Which ones did you graft?

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I could be wrong about a couple without looking at them but “candy” “Albert’s joy” “Nikita” “kazmetz” and “mammoth” if I recall correctly

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Very cool. I have some seedling plants that I’ll probably multi graft next year. Hopefully yours take well so I can just copy your technique.

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My seedling is flowering already
This seems much earlier than normal. Takaka still has not bloomed yet…

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I also decided to bite the bullet and topwork one of my 2 seedlings. We’ll see what happens…

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