cocoa tree in 9b zone outdoors (near water)

What type of trees can you grow along side cocoa trees? it's close to a small pond it has banana growing ok

You can grow cacao in sacramento??!!! Thought they were true tropicals.

they totally are it has to be grown in doors or near water to create a micro climate even then.. there are tons of problems... but i love chocolate. so i do want to see.. what i can do

crap load of water and no below 70

last year we became a 9b or 9a i forget

Hey Tokunbo, I am in Sacramento and was just wondering if I could grow cocoa in Sacramento, did a Google search and what came up, my favorite site lol. Can you tell us more about your experience. I am currently trying my hand at bananas. What problems have you had?

James Colbert wrote:Hey Tokunbo, I am in Sacramento and was just wondering if I could grow cocoa in Sacramento, did a Google search and what came up, my favorite site lol. Can you tell us more about your experience. I am currently trying my hand at bananas. What problems have you had?

It can grow it can pod it's just not very productive.

and needs a habit setup for it.. I haven’t gotten the same results outdoors. Outside of green house. Just been problems. It’s the warmth and water. That’s the major problem. To outdoors. It’s not like ladyfinger banana. Where you can get away with growing in SF. if you just put it in the right spot. Cocoa needs the right spot and then some in sac outdoors. It does ok in FL I’m told but we are. More like a Spain climate. (Dry air)


It’s not easy but if you do it all indoors or green house is is a hell of a lot easier

Problems outdoors pro's and cons
- Shade needed (creating a living green house but "wet" not too "wet" (used gray water)
- Soil neutral pH soils -acid
- Flowering should self-pollen but you may end up cocoa sexup with trees like vanilla plants
- Grows pretty fast and can fruit pretty fast as well
- We had a really weird cold snap. In sac it's in 10 years think we might start snowing it's been that weird
- Our water is bad. Because of that big mine. what it's called. iron mine worst place on planet earth our water can get really bad
- to wet -- doesn't like it --- to dry doesn't like it. Picky tree. Normally even for trees that really don't work well in sac you plant it. it comes in and does ok it's why we have those weird mix of trees when you drive around sac.. trees just grow if put in the grown if they are old enough and safe from the wind.
- wind...... (HATES WIND)
- I haven’t lost my 4 trees yet but they haven’t produce a ton of fruit right now I’m waiting until they get older to pull them out of the pots and into my living green house area.

Things I liked to try
-vanilla beans if i can find a non GMO to grow that I like (i saw one that's grown in africa that might be it) id like to grow more then one type
- id like to have 8 kinds of avocado instead of the 1 i got
- id like to take every meso plant i can get my hands on and grow it. over 100 domesticated plants from pre-columbian america