Holiday and Daily 11 avocados fruited in Davis

 This post describes my experience grafting Holiday and Daily 11 avocado cultivars onto my old (>20 years) Mexicola tree. Holiday was grafted in 2017 and Daily 11 was grafted in 2019. Holiday graft is a very weak grower. This year I grafted it onto a stronger branch of Mexicola to make sure that it has enough support from the stock tree. Daily 11 is a vigorous grower. Both cultivars fruited first time this year. Daily 11 made just one fruit, and Holiday produced four very large avocados. It seems that July is the month when they are ready here in Davis, CA. Daily 11 fruit is actually fell from the tree. I picked the first Holiday fruit on July 20, the same day the Daily 11 fruit fell. Here they are on the scales in the pictures below. Daily 11 is more elongated. 

Daily 11 ripened in 4 days, below pictures are from July 24 2022.

It has hard shell, the flesh can be scooped out as in the picture below 

I wouldn’t call this avocado taste excellent but it is good and has a lot of flesh as the seed was very small. Has a little amount of insignificant fibers.

This graft is making a good number of fruits that should be ready next July.

The Holiday fruit that I picked on July 20 got soft only on July 30. The fruit had perfect texture, very creamy, and gets a very good mark from me. It didn’t have any distinct flavors that could be found in some other cultivars. The shell is hard, the flesh can be easily scooped out. Beautiful fruit with no stings at all.

This small Holiday graft produced 4 large fruits this year.

 I only see one developing fruit that might be ready next July.

I don’t know why, but the seeds from both fruits Daily 11 (left in the image below) and Holiday are pink.

Round melons

 This post lists four cultivars of round melons harvested at the end of July 2022. Two of them have been grown by me, Kolkhoznitsa ( Collective Farm Woman) and Kampyr (Grandma, Кампыр, Бабушка). Two others, Golden Hami and Golden Honeydew have been grown by my farming neighbor Jim.

Left to right in the images below: Kolkhoznitsa, Golden Hami, Golden Honeydew and Kampyr. 

Kolkhoznitsa 

Very sweet, aromatic and complex in flavor, the flesh is medium density.

Golden Hami

Very sweet, the flesh is dense and crunchy. 

Golden Honeydew 

Sweet melting flesh. 

Kampyr 

Melting flesh but not much sugar yet. This wasn’t fully ripe fruit. I will retaste it in a few weeks.

The first three melons are excellent and early ripening. Kampyr should be harvested later. 

Mambo Hybrid and Royal Golden Watermelons

Both Mambo Hybrid and Royal Golden are excellent watermelons. Mambo Hybrid started ripening right after Mama's Girl water melon, and we already consumed around five fruits or so. Royal Golden seems to be a bit later ripening, we cut our first ripe fruit on July 18th. 

Mambo Hybrid fruits are medium in size and green striped. The flesh is very sweet, the seeds are black, and the rind is thick.  Excellent melon.

Royal Golden fruits vary in size and can be very large.  My first fruit was over 20 lbs. However, I see smaller fruits on the vines too. They are supposed to be yellow outside, red inside. However, my first fruit was not uniformly yellow on the outside.  Red and very sweet inside with large white seeds. The rind is very thick and hard. Excellent fruit. 

Watermelons on July 4th 2022

 This post is on the three cultivars of watermelons we tasted on July 4, 2022.  I grew Mama's Girl and Lemon Drop cultivars, and Jim-25 came from my farming neighbor,  Jim.  He is a breeder and produces hybrid seeds.

In the pictures below, the largest is Mama's Girl, the yellow is Lemon Drop, and the smaller green is Jim-25.

All these watermelons turned out to be very good to excellent.  Lemon Gold could take a few more days on the vine, but never the lees was pretty good and crisp.

Jim -25 was crisp and sweet, and the most flavorful and sweet was Mama's Girl.   In summary, I could eat any of these on any day.  All were happily consumed by the family and I.

 

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 March 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.

Check our sales site if we have the cuttings available reallygoodplants.com

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

Check our sales site if we have the cuttings available reallygoodplants.com