RECEIVED WISDOM REJECTED
In the Rare Fruit Council, we are fortunate to have access to a wealth of information about the culture and propagation of fruits. But sometimes, contrary old geezer that I am, I fly in the face of what “everyone knows”.
In our climate, we are limited in our choices of stone fruits (peaches, plums, nectarines, etc.) by two factors: It doesn’t get cold enough for long enough here to cause most of them to fruit, and nematodes in the soil cause problems with many varieties. As to the temperature factor, what everybody knows seems to be true – if they don’t get enough chill hours (usually defined as hours below 40 degrees F), they won’t fruit. But it is also said that our low-chill varieties must be grafted onto a nematode-resistant rootstock to make it here. Being a sucker for seeds of any kind, I have tried growing from seeds a number of low-chill peaches. If grown in a good organic soil, they do just fine. The fruit is usually a reasonable approximation of the parent tree, though I did come up with a fuzzless peach. Stone fruits, even the low-chill varieties, grafted or not, have a pretty short lifetime here in Florida – five to ten years seems typical – so it’s not a bad idea to just keep planting them, and don’t mourn when they die. To start the seeds, you need to carefully crack the hard outer shell (I use Vise Grips) and remove the kernel. Place the kernels in a wet paper towel in a plastic bag in your refrigerator. When they have sprouted, usually after a couple of months, they can be potted and grown on.
It is also said that annonas can’t be air layered. There are indeed many fruits, some tropicals and most temperate fruits, that cannot be propagated by air layering, but I decided to give it a try on my Gefner Atemoya. After the usual couple of months, no roots had developed, but I left them in place. After five months, I was rewarded with nicely rooted specimens. Failures are often caused on annona airlayers by the branch breaking where the bark is peeled. This can be averted by pruning the branch to minimize wind loading, and/or putting a wooden splint on the peeled spot with duct tape. If you are able to air layer other trees, you should be able to do it with annonas.
So get all the information you can from our members, library, speakers and friends. But once in a while, it’s fun to “listen very nicely, then go out and do precisely what you want.”
By Peter Ray
