Neville Passmore Blog: Plant tropical fruit trees

Following on from our recent Neville Passmore Blog on getting your summer garden into gear, we have a follow up article from Neville on planting tropical fruit trees in Perth in summer.

Why?
Tropical trees like the heat and can establish quickly if planted at this time of the year. If mango, avocado, custard apple, feijoa, tropical guava, jaboticaba, macadamia, papaya, Brazil cherry, ice cream bean, tamarillo, wampee, wax jambu, jelly palm, jambolan, sapodilla, longan, lychee, rose water apple, Barbados cherry Aztec fruit and banana appeal then start digging and preparing the hole straight away. By the way, all of these varieties have been successfully fruited in Perth.

How?
The key to getting them off to a good start is a compost enriched soil and regular deep watering through the first summer. A climate shelter is of good value for mango, avocado and lychee. This consists of a shade cloth screen pinned to 4 tomato stakes arranged in a square with a metre between stakes. This can be removed going into the second summer.

Two questions seem to arise whenever I suggest planting trees in suburban areas. How can I fit these into my garden, which is today pretty tiny, and how to control Mediterranean fruit fly, the scourge of all fruit growers in WA.
Dwarf varieties are one option to keep size under control. Another is close planting, instead of say a 6 metre spacing between trees, bung them in a metre apart and let them compete for resources. Hard pruning after fruiting is another controlling method. Containing the root system in a pot has a dramatic effect on the eventual size of a tree. In a practical sense it means you are treating the tree as a bonsai. Training as an espalier can also reduce the room taken by a tree.

Another benefit of growing smaller trees is that these can be covered more easily with an exclusion net at the time of fly activity, to keep the blighters away from your fruit. I have successfully protected Aztec fruit and plums here at home with a shade-cloth net. It also keeps birds from damaging fruit at the same time. Another method I have used with success is to bag the fruit in double lined paper sandwich bags, with a twist-tie to seal off the stem end. These, amazingly, will resist breakdown from rain or irrigation and need only be applied when fruit is near full size but still very green.