Tigerlaff

You only ever hear great things about M-4. It's even got a spreading kind of growth habit and I've seen people pull them off in pots. Low disease pressure too if I remember right. Only ate one last year but it was a coconut bomb and very sweet.

:lol: dragon fruit and avocados baw. 2 things I won't touch. But you will succeed. Just a minor setback.

Planted another prosciutto unknown fig tree today. I have 2 in the ground. Best figs I've ever had. That should be the last new outdoor planting of the year.


Also had an excellent LSU Hollier fig today. This tree spent winter in the greenhouse so I have an early crop.


Lost the single lychee that my tiny tree set. I knew it was too good to be true this early on such a small tree.


Mexican cigar plant coming back from the freeze and blooming early.

Got in my Qinmi #9 passionfruit today. This is a Chinese commercial variety developed in 2021 in Guangdong. It's a yellow passionfruit with an average brix of 18-22. That is insanely sweet for a passionfruit. This one is going to stay in a 20g pot with trellis. I paid a retarded amount for this twig and have very high hopes for it. If it succeeds, I'll give all of you cuttings.

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I should not have clicked on that link. Now I want a cherry tree.

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Uhhh... don't look at the jaboticabas. That's where you will really get sucked in. Elite container trees. The best, really.

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Well my puppies got my Pickering that was just starting to flush out!

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Would be an Old Yeller moment for me.

Planted what should be my last in ground tree of 2026. This is Cherry of the Rio Grande (Eugenia involucrata), a special large fruited cultivar called Ben's Beaut. It produces a sweet fruit with flavor similar to a Bing cherry with an additional note of banana.

I own other Eugenia plants like Suriname cherry and grumichama, but this is the only one I believe I can get away with in the ground. In the recent Florida freezes, this plant was the only thing that was universally untouched besides loquats/figs/etc.

But what really convinced me was this YouTube video. This guy grows all kinds of container fruits like lychee and loquat in southeast Texas zone 9a. He has a cherry of the Rio Grande in a large pot that he has left outside for the last 5 years and has rooted into the ground. It survived snowmageddon in January 2025 with a low of 12F experiencing only a few inches of limb die back. In January 2026, he got below 20F and the tree is fruiting this spring. For those keeping track, that means this tree needs less protection than loquat to bear fruit in 9a. A loquat tree will take colder but its fruits and flowers won't.

I'll be excited to monitor this one and see how it performs in south Louisiana. I do not get as cold as the guy in the video and I planted in a southern facing protected location with half day sun and over canopy. I will probably protect it for the first 2 winters to let it get established. As always, blasted off the garbage bark sludge soil from the nursery and planted on a mound of sandy soil with mulch.

Feijoa popping off.


Pawpaw graft still pushing!

Like cgrand said, just go to your local nursery and pick out some huge clay planters (prepare to pay $$$) and drop your plastic pots into the clay ones. I never recommend planting anything directly in an ornamental clay pot unless you are fine with eventually digging the tree out of it, which can be nearly impossible, or breaking the pot.

Costco has a sale on 20gal white polymer pots right now. They are great and stay cool. I think they are like $13 each.

I have tried painting the black pots white before, but be prepared to apply a couple of coats of primer first before the paint. The paint does not want to stick to the plastic and will flake off and look terrible.

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It's the lemon

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OK good. That's the one you want. It's better than the red in almost every way... except growth habit. The red can be trained into a nice sturdy standard tree but the yellow is always going to be this sprawling spindly thing with long thin branches. I would definitely recommend pruning to two trunks for a few reasons. First, the more trunks you have the more random shoots you will get growing everywhere that have to be pruned. I have to prune this tree A LOT. 3 trunks will be a mess. 2 trunks is perfect because in my experience it really doesn't want to have a stable single trunk and you need a couple to provide enough hardwood to give the tree structure. Third, the long spindly growth habit means it is an easy tree to break. Hurricane, pot falls over, etc. If one trunk gets accidentally broken you have a backup until it can develop a new one. Here's what mine has ended up looking like. It's about 8 feet tall and the trunks are tied to a 6 foot t-stake. You will also notice that 1 of my 2 trunks splits, so it basically serves the same function as a 3rd trunk. I would rather that shape than three unconnected trunks.





Years down the road when these trunks are thick enough I'll hat rack the tree and finally grow it out as a standard.

That cattley guava is taking off, nice! Unfortunately I don't know anything about muscadine. Closest I come is jaboticaba which is, uhhh, not helpful.

This is the most confusing team I've ever seen. Sometimes they look like they have zero talent and don't care. Sometimes they look like they are willing to die on the diamond. If we win this Sheerin just saved the game and put his season at risk.