• 55 Posts
  • 15 Comments
Joined 20 days ago
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Cake day: March 28th, 2025

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  • You have a ton of potential in South Florida! (Until sea level rise floods everything, of course.) Will you add more fruit trees? The nurseries in your area have some amazing options. Which mangos and avocados do you grow? I’m curious about the quality of ‘Monroe’ and ‘Oro Negro’ avocados.

    It’s strange what’s happening with your avocados. Do you know if the bloom timing of avocados in your area has changed at all? If they were previously getting pollinated by trees that now bloom at different times, then that could explain the lack of fruits.

    If it’s a choice between banana and grass, I recommend banana 100%. Pine Island and Excalibur both sold Dwarf Namwah last I checked, and that should be very productive. Excalibur also sells FHIA-18, which doesn’t taste so much like banana. I recently posted about it here, though the linked PDF is in spanish.



  • Sounds like you’ve got a great thing going! Maintaining fertility by mulching with cut vegetation and composting “waste” is really important. How big is your fruit forest? Do you plan to diversify further and fill up the field? How small do you plan to keep the trees? I’ve found that pruning tall trees with a pole saw is really tedious and exhausting. Do you have a particular method that’s easier?




  • If Iceland can grow bananas, then oil palms don’t seem like much of a stretch. But whether they are grown outdoors in the lowland tropics or in a greenhouse somewhere else, that’s land that cannot be native forest. At least in the tropics, it’s possible to implement an agroforestry system that includes both oil palms and native trees, but in a greenhouse somewhere cold… nope. Even if the yield would be greater than that of more cold-tolerant oil crops, more energy would be needed for heating in the winter, so intuitively, it doesn’t seem practical except where there would be large amounts of “waste” heat anyway, like near geothermal vents or power plants.

    Fortunately, palm oil is not essential for nutrition, and many industrial applications could use (e.g.) hemp oil if palm oil is not available, so it’s not necessary to increase production of palm oil. About half of world production goes to “livestock” feed anyway.





















  • Hello and thank you for your thoughtful comment. In general, I agree. I was not insinuating that Dipteryx oleifera trees (or plants in general) are only valuable as a source of food. They provide a myriad of ecosystem services, and all life in the forest is connected and interdependent. I simply meant that while some fruit-bearing plants are widely planted outside of their native range for food (durians, mangos, peaches, and probably most things that we both eat), this particular tree is probably not worth planting for its fruit alone (especially considering its size), and therefore it doesn’t make sense to grow it outside of its native range as one might do with some other fruit trees. Within its native range, it could be worth planting for the sake of restoring the forest, in which case eating the fruit would be a bonus.

    Of course, no animal is food.