MANGO TOP-WORKING

[00:00:01]What's happening, YouTube?

[00:00:04]I'm Matthew Reese.

[00:00:05]Coming at you from Southwest Florida.

[00:00:08]I'm going to show you something about fruit trees that you may or may not have thought about.

[00:00:14]So, believe it or not, you can grow a fruit tree and decide you don't like it.

[00:00:20]And you can actually do something about that.

[00:00:24]It's not permanent. You can You can always change it out.

[00:00:28]So, some of the fruit trees I'm talking about, specifically mango trees, in my grove, turned out to be kind of no bueno. I didn't like them.

[00:00:38]Either the fruit sucked, or there was disease problems, or it was unproductive, or whatever.

[00:00:45]And what can you do about that?

[00:00:48]Well, you can always top work them over to something else.

[00:00:52]Here's an example here.

[00:00:55]This tree is now Jumbo Keitt. It used to be Irwin.

[00:01:01]Some of you love Irwin. Some of you, especially I know I know in Japan they think it's like Miyazaki or something.

[00:01:07]It's beautiful fruit.

[00:01:09]My opinion, it's not worth having here in Florida. For me. For me. I'm not talking about you.

[00:01:15]You do what you want to do.

[00:01:17]For me, it's not worth having. Here's another one.

[00:01:21]This one is called Zill Indo Chinese.

[00:01:25]This is a top work. Some of it Some of it got a little bit of a cold damage.

[00:01:29]But it used to be Alphonso.

[00:01:32]Alphonso's a great fruit. It sucks here.

[00:01:34]No good here.

[00:01:36]There's a super Alphonso. There's other ones that are kind of sort of similar, but the one I had, no good.

[00:01:43]Not productive, not disease tolerant.

[00:01:45]Now it's Zill Indo Chinese.

[00:01:48]Now, those trees I actually cut them down.

[00:01:52]I waited for the new sprouts to emerge, and then I grafted onto the new sprouts.

[00:01:56]I picked three or four that were all pointing away from each other, establish the new structure of the tree.

[00:02:04]I have other examples. This is a tree behind me is called Diamond.

[00:02:10]Now, most people share the same opinion that the Diamond's no good.

[00:02:18]Unfortunately, most of you haven't actually tasted the Diamond, so you don't know.

[00:02:23]You just A lot of people repeat what they hear.

[00:02:26]My experience with this tree, some years it's no good, some years it's fantastic.

[00:02:33]Last year it was fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. Actually, I had several people or no, it was the year before that, sorry.

[00:02:41]Anyway, I had two people, three people that came to me afterwards saying, "Can you please make me a tree?"

[00:02:46]So, not everyone hates Diamond, but it's not marketable. It doesn't have a big following, so it's not necessarily going to stay in my collection long-term. So, what am I doing?

[00:02:57]I'm actually starting to graft another This is a new variety.

[00:03:03]This one's called Caramond that I got from my buddy Berto.

[00:03:08]And I'm just grafting onto I did one back here. This one I don't think took.

[00:03:14]But this one looks like it took. What I'm going to do if this if this graft does succeed, is I'll cut the branch right there. So, and I'll probably cut this branch out and let this whole This whole side of the tree will be the new variety.

[00:03:29]Caramond, by the way, is a uh cross between Carrie and Imam Pasand.

[00:03:37]I am looking forward to tasting that fruit this year. My buddy Berto, who's the the originator of that variety, is very pleased with it and uh so, I'm happy to add it to my collection to evaluate it for me, for here.

[00:03:51]And uh if it does well, then I'll make trees and you'll know about it.

[00:03:56]Um but you can change these things out.

[00:03:58]Here's another one here.

[00:04:00]Uh this tree, the second one, this was a CAC mango tree.

[00:04:05]CAC is a fantastic It's fantabulous.

[00:04:08]It's one of the best.

[00:04:11]If you've had it, you get it. You know what it's like. The problem I had with CAC is that it's ultra vigorous.

[00:04:19]And with the tree spacing that I have, it was outgrowing its space every year. And I would have to prune it pretty heavily every year.

[00:04:29]And then it wouldn't fruit the following year cuz I had had to prune it too much.

[00:04:33]So, it didn't fit in this space. So, what I did was I grafted some more CAC trees and I planted them somewhere else and I top worked this one over to pineapple pleasure. And now we have pineapple pleasure growing there.

[00:04:46]And I don't think it fruited this year, probably because of the cold.

[00:04:50]But all that to say you do have some ability to change things, even if you get a fruit that you don't like.

[00:04:59]You can change it. It's just a matter of whether you will bother to do that.

[00:05:04]Um in this grove here, I have a bunch of young trees.

[00:05:09]Some of them got knocked back back by the cold and some of them did fine. Some of them died.

[00:05:17]So, what I just went through and did last week was I put new seeds right next to the the original tree. And the idea being those new seedlings I'm going to graft them into the original tree to strengthen the original tree.

[00:05:32]And in the places where the original tree has died, I will take budwood from another one down the down the line and graft it onto the new rootstock. So, it'll be grafted in place.

[00:05:46]You don't actually, you know, and then I'm this I'm a nurseryman.

[00:05:50]You don't actually have to Don't tell anybody. You don't actually have to buy grafted fruit trees.

[00:06:00]You could actually just plant your own seeds and then graft onto them.

[00:06:04]I'll show you an example right here.

[00:06:08]So, this is my property line and here's a seedling that came up on its own.

[00:06:17]This is a rootstock that I didn't plant. It's just been growing here.

[00:06:22]But, I grafted a new variety on top.

[00:06:24]This is called Juno. This is a rubra pedala cambodiana hybrid.

[00:06:29]And you can see it's starting to push out new growth now.

[00:06:35]You could do that on purpose.

[00:06:38]You could just plant seeds everywhere.

[00:06:42]Wait for them to grow. You could plant seeds in clusters. You can plant seeds down a whole line.

[00:06:47]The seeds are a lot cheaper than a grafted tree.

[00:06:52]And if you choose to, you could graft onto them later if you choose to develop that skill.

[00:06:58]Um that's something you can do.

[00:07:01]So, all that to say as long as you're within the same species, you can you can change the channel just like you change your clothes.

[00:07:10]You want to change out to another variety or you can add a variety. You'll see people doing cocktail trees and multi-grafts.

[00:07:17]Um there's nothing wrong with that. You can do that. I'll show you another one.

[00:07:24]Here's a kind of a forested area. I've got a lot of mango seeds germinating and kind of popping up. Some of these are bigger than others. Here's one that I did kind of recently.

[00:07:36]It's actually another Juno and you can see it is pushing out of the top.

[00:07:43]And wouldn't you know it?

[00:07:44]Wouldn't you know it?

[00:07:47]We're going to have yet another Juno tree.

[00:07:51]Um so for those of you have been following me, you've probably seen me doing these little syntropic nests. And uh a lot of those have started. We've had on and off rain, so it's kind of a mixed bag of what what's working, but you'll see like like that's a jack bean, tithonia, and a bunch of other stuff in there.

[00:08:16]What I'm going to start doing cuz I have the seeds is just start plopping in mango seeds in all my little uh all those little happy little situations.

[00:08:27]And it just gives me a new more opportunities to graft later. If I don't graft, cool.

[00:08:31]It could just be a biomass. If I want to graft, cool. I can do that. If I want to let it grow as a seedling and express and see if we come up with a new variety, that's cool, too.

[00:08:42]All those options are available if you're willing to try. If you're willing to plant the seeds and uh give yourself the opportunity to learn.

[00:08:54]Here's one final example. This is my uh Mangifera lalijiwa tree.

[00:09:00]Uh you can see it's got a few fruits holding this year, not that much.

[00:09:04]But I was able to find another lalijiwa.

[00:09:07]This is lalijiwa yellow. Has a yellow flesh instead of a white flesh.

[00:09:11]And I'm grafting it onto that tree just to see, just to have them both on the same tree.

[00:09:17]I want to compare the fruit side by side.

[00:09:20]And uh if one's better than the other, then it'll end up in the nursery.

[00:09:25]But anyway, that's it for now. Hopefully that was helpful or encouraging to you.

[00:09:29]Let me know if you've uh tried any of this stuff before, top working, or you know, planting seeds, grafting in place, all that kind of stuff.

[00:09:38]It's a lot of fun and uh it can be very valuable to you if you're willing to learn.

[00:09:43]We'll see you next time.