Kadsura coccinea, male and perfect flowers

 In this post I show two types of flowers my Kadsura vines are producing now. The first type doesn’t contain pistil, which is the female part. These flowers only contain stamens, the male parts, and can be classified as male flowers. Below are the pictures of male flowers from two different seedling vines, a pink and a green selection.

The other type of flowers my vines are making seem to be perfect or hermaphrodites. They have both the male and female parts. The below pictures show the pistil (the female part) above the stamens.

It’s not easy to find pictures of the inner parts of Kadsura coccinea flowers. I found one good picture which shows that pistil can be significantly branched, or maybe there are multiple pistils. It’s possible that my vines are too young right now to produce flowers with well-developed pistils.

Root grafting

 This post is about my experimentation with root grafting of figs, mulberries, and apricots. In late February and early May of 2022 I had to root prune a number of my trees that were being migrated to a new orchard.  As a result, I had many root cuttings that were pretty healthy and I decided to experiment with using them as rootstocks.  I grafted the scions of figs, mulberries and apricots onto the corresponding root pieces.  Bellow are the pictures with the pieces of wood, roots, and the resulting plants.

Figs

Only two grafts were made, they both produced plants, and were planted in the new orchard just over 2 months after grafting.

The fig pictures below are from May 6, 2022

Mulberry 

The mulberries were grafted onto pieces of roots from a mature seedling mulberry. The following number of mulberries were grafted/ made to plants:

Buluklu 4/ 3

Easter Egg 1/ 0

Galicia 2/ 0

Isfahan 1/ 1

Tabriz 4/ 4

Taiwanese 2/ 2

Out of 14 root-grafted cuttings, I got 10 plants that were ready to be field-planted in 2 months.

Below are the pictures of the roots, scions, and the freshly grafted material.

It seems that the cleft grafts worked better than bark grafts, but the numbers are too low for any particular cultivar to make any conclusions on the best type of graft to use for the root grafting.

The pictures below are from the field planting of Tabriz and Taiwanese plants.  Grafted on February 26 and planted on May 6, 2022.

Tabriz

Taiwanese

Apricots

On March 1, 2022 the apricot scions were grafted onto the pieces of roots from mature apricot seedling. The following number of scions were grafted/ made to plants:

Aura's Mystery 2/ 1

Shekar Pareh  1/ 1

Waught 1/ 0

Peixote Blenheim - 1/ 1

Moniqui - 1/ 1

Hassan Krasnyi - 1/ 0

Altair 4 - 1/ 1

Ram Rock - 1/ 0

Routers Peach - 1/ 0

In total, 10 root pieces were grafted and 5 became successful plants.

Here are the pictures of the combinations that later became new plants:

And below are the combinations that failed.

From the above pictures, I do not see any correlations between the root piece size, amount of feeder roots, etc and the fate of the graft.  The failures are most likely due to inefficient connections between the stem and root cambial layers.

Below are a couple of successful plants that were field planted on May 13, 2022.

Tasting mulberries: Skinner vs Himalayan DMOR9

 Skinner makes lager fruits that start ripening at least a week before Himalayan DMOR9. The leaf shapes are different too, see the picture below. In the taste test on April 13, 2022, DMOR9 fruits were significantly sweeter and more flavorful. Both plants are in pots and this is a preliminary evaluation. In the picture below, Skinner is on the left and DMOR9 is on the right.

On April 8, 2022 I posted a video about these and other long fruited mulberries https://youtu.be/CVLL18msS44

Reinking and Thong Dee Pomelos

 Reinking was my most preferred pomelo until today when I tried Thong Dee the first time.  Reinking (1340 g) also needed a bit more time on the tree. Both fruits were pretty good, but Thong Dee (1370 g) is sweeter and juicier.

Reinking

Thong Dee