Tony:

You had Christmas and Bradenton at my house. I like Bradenton better, but Christmas is larger fruited. Oliver is also supposed to be very good, but I haven't had it yet. Not sure where they have any of these. My trees were given to me by a friend. But, they are very easy to graft.....so buy a seedling or plant some seeds and then get budwood from me and graft what you like or both if you like.

Harry

Bradenton were excellent.

the Christmas i think were a little early because they had no flavor.

Harry - I just bought two loquat seedlings on ebay. In a few weeks, I'm taking you up on your offer and graft both of those trees. I liked both but prefered the first type we tried, not sure which one of the two that was though.

Tony

May dad enjoyed eating loquats in Florida but I don't know what the variety was. Do these trees need to be quite large to fruit? My dad really wanted to grow one from seed but I was telling him that not all fruits will grow an produce well from seed. I told him that I wasn't even sure if they required a cross pollinqator or not.
Harry,
What do you think? Is it worth growing one of these in a pot? It's not like my dad is interested in other tropical fruits. He likes what he likes and that's it. I was thinking if they can fruit and be kept around 5ft than maybe I could get him one but I wanted to see what you had to say first. How are your mangoes coming along Harry? My cogshall seems to be putting out some good growth. I realized this spring how easily the leaves scorch from the sun. I moved all my tropicals in when we had a week of stormy weather and then put them back out. Within one day, the newer lighter green leaves burned but I do see quite a bit of growth. It seems that they just needed the warm spring rains to grow.
Andrew

Tony:

I believe that you liked the Christmas better. It was the larger fruited variety with less sub-acid flavor. It was the tree closer to my neighbor's fence.

Andrew:

I am relatively new to loquat. I grew up with them as landscape trees everywhere (we called them Japanese Plum) but never thought to eat the fruit. My trees have been planted out for about two years. And were about 3-4 feet tall when I got them. Obviously, I have never grown them in a pot, but I think they would fruit for you in a pot. They grew about a foot a year, unpruned. I think they react fine to pruning from what I hear.

On the mango front...the news is not good. The much hoped for addtional bloom cycle doesn't look like it is going to happen. I have tree after tree with little or no fruit. Very depressing. I've eaten Rosigold and an Edward, but with the limited number of fruits, the squirrels and birds are getting a ridiculousy large percentage of the available fruit. This could be the worst mango crop since the year after Hurricane Wilma when there were virtually no mangoes to seak of as a result of severe canopy loss and uprooting of most of my trees. I am thinking that some of the SE Asian types may still throw a bloom, but the Indian culivars are probably done for the year.

Harry

I'm not real familiar with loquat varieties, so I was reading this for education. Excalibur, in western Lake Worth, FL sells a selection, and Our Kids in Orlando also sells grafted loquats. Abundant Edible Landscaping in Gainesville, has some too. My nursery (Edible Plant Project, Gainesville) mostly sells seedlings, but they came from trees at Our Kids that are used for budwood, and since they're only crossing among name-variety trees, they usually make good large fruit. Lately, Our Kids is selling mostly double-grafted trees with their two sections: Tori and Aidan. When I went there picking from their trees, I think my favorite was SE2 (maybe SES#2). I just got some budwood and grafted a few of them, so we'll see if they take.

Seedlings take about seven years to grow a few fruits. Grafts are faster, but the trees are fairly slow-growing.

I hear Christmas is supposed to fruit in Christmas, but I haven't seen that happen. I've had Wolf before, and it's pretty good. I saw one called Novak with green fruit on it that looked like they were going to be huge, but I haven't got to try any yet.

Here are some links with loquat information: http://growables.org/information/TropicalFruit/loquatvarieties.htm
http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/pdffiles/MG/MG05000.pdf

I would just like to say that air layering loquats have been really successful for me, I hav a 8 foot tall tree about 15 yrs old, I do notice that they like the colder weather that's why they don't do so good down where I live, we have varieties golden nugget, and mammoth something are the best. I just grafted som 3 ft tall seedlings and the two grafts took and and are fusing nicely!!

I know it sounds wrong but I have much better success air layering woody large branches. Soft green wood has never worked for me. It normally takes a full year and at that time the roots are tiny but I have snipped off 5 foot branches and had them work. Within a second year you would never have guessed they were propagated. I cut through the bark, splay open the wound, pack it full of rooting hormone, wrap a wet mound of sterile potting mix which also has rooting hormone added to it around the wound, cover it with a couple of layers of aluminum foil and rubber bands and wait a year.