Please check out
http://www.crfg.org/pubs/ff/cherimoya.html

1. May be a little too late when the flower is open at about 45 degrees.

2. The tree is too young to have fruits. Bearing fruits sucks too much energy from the tree. A cherimoya fruit usually weighs a pound or more.

3. For "the initial set of flowers may produce infertile pollen", where did you find the statement? It seems true by experience.

hi tagtail, thanks for your reply. i think i read in some forums posting somwehere about the initial flower's infertile pollen.

i will try to pollinate earlier in the female flower cycle, maybe that is the difference in that the stigma may still be sticky and receptive at that point, perhaps i am catching it too late.

agree with you that the tree is too young to have fruits. i just wanted to practice manual pollination to understand it, and then remove the baby fruit.

Hey Stu, if the anthers are brown, you may have waited too long to collect the pollen. When my Cherimoya plants flowers are fully open, you can see the greyish anthers with the powdery grey/white pollen sacs. When I lightly touch the pollen sacs, the pollen easily falls off into my collection container. On larger trees, there are usually plenty of male and female stage flowers open at the same time. I like to collect a lot of pollen, maybe at least 10 or so flowers and then dabbing just the tip of my brush into the container while giving it a slight twist to pick up as much pollen as possible.

I normally pollinated my cherimoyas early in the morning, selecting flowers that are just barely open. Sometimes, I will even tease open a flower that is fully closed but appears like it will open soon. Your tree may just be too young.

Are you sure its a cherimoya and not some other hybrid? I though there were some hybrids that would not take their own pollen but don't quote me on that. Well, your tree is young so I wouldn't worry about it for now. Maybe it knows that it lacks the size to carry fruit. Please keep us updated on the progress of your tree,
Simon

Thanks Simon for your help!

I see a lot of pea size "things" after the flower petals drop. Does this mean these are pollinated fruitlets or just how all of them look? I notice the flowers I don't pollinate just dry up and don't even have these pea size things so they seem like fruitlets. But the thing is these eventually just fall off in like 2 weeks. So I'm not sure if I'm successful at pollination and the tree is too young (or not enough/too much water, etc) so they're dropping, or these are not actually pollinated.

The reason I'm skeptical that these are fruitlets are that these appear to be what's in the flower to begin with. So now the petals drop and they are just visible.

Anyone have a picture of what a 1-2 week pollinated cherimoya fruitlet should look like?

I found this picture online.

http://www.hawaiifruit.net/Cherimoya_files/image009.gif

The 2nd from the left and the farthest right are what my attempted pollinations look like after a week. Does this stage indicate whether pollination was a success, failure, or too early to tell?

Stu123,
From the picture in the link, I think the both are successfuly pollination. The failed ones will be wilted in 2~3 days.

That looks right, how big is your tree? I'm in OC too and my El Bumpo is about 7ish feet tall and will get started on fruit but after some growth they just stop developing and fall off. Apparently it needs to get to about 8 feet tall to be able to support the fruit.

Some good news to report. I got 5 little fruitlets now, they've been growing a bit for 2 weeks. This was on a grafted tree that's 2 years in the ground. Perhaps it won't hold fruit but at least it was good to go through the pollination phase.

My seedling tree did not hold any fruitlets at all. Not sure if it's a seedling problem, or that the tree is just too young. I suspect the latter. Anyway, I'll try again next year with the seedling.

Thanks much for everyone's help. If I wasn't so lazy, I would take some pics and post here. haha.

I'm not sure you are still interested, but just in case, here is my experience with Cherimoya Polination:
I love cherimoyas, but due to their expensive cost, I don't think I ate more than 4-5 in my life, so a few years ago I planted a seed and it germinated and now I have a 3.5 ft tall tree. It germinated many years ago, I think about 6-7 years ago, but I didn't take it too seriously, and it's still in a 2 gallon pot, instead in the ground.
Last year it was the first time that it flowered. I was so excited and searched a lot on the internet and read many forums about how to pollinate those flowers.
I followed instructions just like you did, and no luck. All flowers dried out within days after the petals fell.
This year, it made again 5 flowers, but I did not even bother to try pollinating them again. I noticed that 1 flower did not even open fully, but remained in the female stage for a several days. Eventually, the petals fell but the stem with the tiny ball left from the flower, did not dry out, nor it grew further, just remained like that small till 2 weeks ago when I left on vacation.
Before leaving on vacation, I put miracle grow to all my plants in the backyard, including the cherimoya tree which I still have in the pot.
Yesterday I returned from my vacation, and noticed the leaves of the cherimoya tree were huge, about 8 inches long and 5 inches wide, which was not the case before.
I said to myself, it must be due to the miracle grow fertilizer, and while admiring the leaves, I discovered that the fruit grew and it was now 1 inch in diameter.
I have no idea how it pollinated, since I only have 1 cherimoya tree, I did not bother to manual pollinate it, and the 5 flowers opened many days apart. Moreover this particular flower did not even open fully to ever become a male, but remained at the female stage.
It is a mystery to me...
Maria

Report it into a bigger container. You can expect it to grow bigger with more flowers. Consider yourself lucky that it naturally pollimates for you.

Thanks Rodney...
I am hesitant to put it in the ground since where I live (outskirts of Salinas, CA), we get a few days of frost in the Winter time, and have read that cherimoyas do not tolerate frost.
If I have it in the pot, I can put it inside or garage on the days with frost.
Still amazed how it pollinated on its own...maybe it's due to the fact that it never fully opened...I'll never know, I guess :)
Again, thanks for replying

That is curious, I swear I saw the species of beetle that is thought to be the pollinator down here though.

I've also heard of wind being able to do it in rare cases, but you may simply just be in the perfect area for it.

I desperately need your help in this matter. My cherimoya fruitlets kept dropping about 3-4 a day. They're still green and nice looking, about 1 inch long. The tree still looks healthy, no leaf yellowing or dropping. I live in southern CA so weather is still ok around 54F at night. Can you let me know what's going on? What can I do? My tree is about 5-6ft tall and I've had it for 3 years now. I did a very good job with the hand pollination this year and there're about 100 fruitlets. Is this the reason? The tree can't bear that many fruits? I do see about 3 big fruits about a lime already. What can I do to keep those fruits? Thanks for your help.

I think that might be it, mine does fruit drop as well, when they are young (if I recall what was said) you may get 100% drop if it isn't at critical mass. Even then you may only get 1 or 2 per branch in the early times.

I got one medium orange size cherimoya on a Elixir. Naturally pollinated, so I had a low seed count. Tree was only about 4ft tall with a trunk about 1 inch thick. Tree is growing in a 15 gal container. In early spring, I intend to replant into 20-30 gal fabric containers. The tree seems to be very happy in its container

'Elixir' Cherimoya

Just out of curiosity, when you water, do you get the whole tree or just the soil?