George Booth

May Lotito wrote:The tree has tripled in size in the past year. However, there's noticeable chlorosis in the younger leaves and that can affect fruit setting. Can you pinpoint which immobile element is low and fertilize accordingly?

Since this picture has been taken I've gotten fruit set on almost all branches you see, the leaves have darkened and fruits are all bigger than marbles with maybe 16 in total. Now there's multiple branches sending out more blossoms as well as a few new branches so it seems to want to be an ever bloomer to some degree. I toss all kinds of stuff on this thing like plant tone organic fert, hefty layers of aged municipal compost, my own homemade compost with crushed charged biochar, nice layers of leaf mold from a tarp that sits under our jack fruit trees and forms leaf mold over time, banana stocks, albesia logs, lychee leaves, jackfruit leaves, bamboo leaves, papaya tree stalks, and anything that makes sense at the time and I have around. I don't put all that stuff on at once but those are the things it's been fed around it in it's lifetime so far. It was also planted over a couple of medium sized lava rocks so it will be harvesting minerals from those over time as the roots do their thing.

Gop Xrock wrote:It does not look like a Tangelo. Tell me if it tasted like one. 1.5 years from seed, if it's a true Tangelo would be amazing. I grew blood orange from seeds (4 trees) and no fruits. It have been 7 - 8  years. It's 6 - 7 ft tall.

Yeah I don't believe they are a true Tangelo but rather some sort of hybrid that originated from a seed in a Tangelo. I've yet to taste them yet because my mom and one of her workers were picking them when they started to turn partially yellow because they thought they were lemons. I've got some almost ripe now to try but still gotta wait, there's also baby fruit on the tree and new flower buds as well right now.

Holy smokes the fruit are still on there hidden by all the new foliage but need more time to ripen, but there's flower buds growing on almost all new branches. I really didn't expect that because research had told me not to expect a secondary flowering for a few years. Guess it's just another experience that goes to show me that sometimes it's better try things my own ways.

Lately there's been a couple of roosters sleeping in the fruit trees near my house and they very loudly start crowing at about 3:30 a.m. and don't stop till they're ready to go foraging in the morning, it's been awful for my sleep. My whole life the wild roosters would sleep on the giant hillside of trees further away from my house but this new generation... Also lately the wild pigs have ate my sweet corn I was trying to save for seeds, dug up and ate all my purple sweet potatoes, and trampled and flattened a lot of my watermelon plants. Giving up isn't exactly the feeling but I don't even want to go out side and look at all my plants first thing in the morning anymore, it used to be part of my daily pattern but with low sleep and expectation of nightly damage I just don't want to. Little by little a sort of primal instinct is setting in and kind of like the rooster crows to establish it's territory I will have to establish my own.

Unfortunately I'm giving up on this website. They changed the UI to not have the customizable option anymore and the standard one is the most cluster f from the early 00's of websites UI I've seen since back then. I don't even know how to navigate the clutter to post in the correct place but I thought it'd be fair for the owners to hear the reflection. Good luck and good bye.

Nancy Reading wrote:

George Booth wrote:Serious question, do you guys use the blades that are specialized for pruning? Here in Hawaii they don't sell them on the shelves of home depot or ace hardware so the majority of people are unaware they even exist and are always using the blades designed with teeth to cut through dried lumber, it bothers me in a pet peeve way because it'd be so easy to hop on Amazon and order a pack of the correct blade for the tool you already own. As far as straight cuts go I always use a relief cut on the opposite side so sometimes I get the angles mismatched and it's not straight but that's my own error, usually just having a good blade and utilizing the tools fence + some cutting techniques sometimes like see-sawing to lessen the amount of teeth cutting at the same.

It's a fairly coarse blade with coarse teeth flat on the outside on both sides and angled in the middle. A bit like my hand pruning saw, except that only cuts in the pull direction, whereas the reciprocating saw cuts in both directions. I have finer metal blades and a coarser 'demolition blade' for wood with nails.
When I'm felling the wood I use a cut on the opposite side to save excessive damage, but not for chopping to length. Thinking about it - my cutting the wood green is generally not quite so bad as now it has been stood a little while. Part of that may be that the trees don't rock around being rooted in the ground, but ergonomically it isn't always as good then of course.

I've been shown the relief cut both in high end wood working to prevent blow out on the back side and in pruning to prevent peel off and obviously when felling a tree use a notch relief cut to prevent getting smooshed. To me it kind of sounds like your trying to mix the two worlds of wood working/carpentry with pruning techniques.

Serious question, do you guys use the blades that are specialized for pruning? Here in Hawaii they don't sell them on the shelves of home depot or ace hardware so the majority of people are unaware they even exist and are always using the blades designed with teeth to cut through dried lumber, it bothers me in a pet peeve way because it'd be so easy to hop on Amazon and order a pack of the correct blade for the tool you already own. As far as straight cuts go I always use a relief cut on the opposite side so sometimes I get the angles mismatched and it's not straight but that's my own error, usually just having a good blade and utilizing the tools fence + some cutting techniques sometimes like see-sawing to lessen the amount of teeth cutting at the same.

Something I've found out this year is that pickle worms will attack light skin watermelons with certainty, the sugar babies are right there next to them untouched. I'm not growing any other dark skin varieties right now but next year I'll probably test out a few new ones. I would have been excited about this because I was growing some kind I don't know the name of that gets about 40 pounds easily and is very light skinned, my old room mate brought the seeds over from New Mexico and didn't recall the variety.

I actually have some deep cracks in the soil around my Tangelo seedling that's fruiting after 1 year of growth. I'm thinking the tree might actually be liking the air access to the roots after the rainy season because after the cracks were there for a few weeks and we've been getting some decent summer rains the tree exploded with new branches everywhere. I'm in Hawaii so no voles, ground hogs, or any burrowing animals. It's just clay soil that goes from being heavily saturated to sun baked, it doesn't crack anywhere I have mulch down but I can't mulch very far away from the tree right now because the wild chickens would just remove it.

I haven't had that luxury yet as I have been on a spend as little as possible journey. I have saved seeds from carrots for a few years now and I'm on the 5th generation I think now and I was able to select one that grew massive that I will save the seeds from. Didn't even think to taste it but from the seeds I'll try tasting next generations to see which to save next. As others have said though the soil health and growing conditions make a huge difference as you can find for yourself by planting seeds in multiple conditions like I tried. Also in the future I think I'll be planting shade crops to the south of my carrots so they can last longer in the Hawaii sun without going to seed.