I like these kinds of articles!
Bubbling in Sulfuric acid in water or direct injection in a soil will not set
well with some diehard environmentalists. When we use this acid we
have to be rather secret about it or at least we have had to as the
impact on the ground water is or will be the primary concern for a few
others to go along with. If Florida will allow this treatment a lot of their
Citrus Canker problem might be alleviated. This can be one of the
methods used to help clean up the Citrus rootstocks, rather than
using soil fumigants which are more likely used to limit the spread
of the disease, rather than suppress what is already there.
Macadamias can be tough to grow as their low temperature range is
not all that conducive for areas of Florida. If we can get five years of
these trees in the ground with no wood loss from the 28-26 degree
cold then they have a chance to better adapt and then may prosper
in Florida. The problem that people in marginal areas will face and
I've been through it is that when a tree gets hit by the cold and my
trees endured temps down to 6 degrees that the wood on the trunks
much like Citrus and Avocados splits open from the top down and
the resulting opening has to be taken care of sooner than later with
a pruning, sometimes using a tree sealant to cover over any open
wounds left after the pruning. A white latex painting of the trunk
after the sealant has dried will stave off any borers from entering.
A wounded tree can get borers to come in and certain aphids can
attach to the undersides of the leaves in the Spring same as Spider
Mites during dry Summers, so Macadamias are not completely
insect free in a warm and dry climate here but may have less
insect activity in a warm and moist climate like Florida. The
insects other than the possibility of borers really become of no
economic significance. We can have some fungal issues with
the nuts however but since I have not grown Macadamias in
Florida I don't know if they will face the fungal problems that
other areas have to a small extent but even then we are again
talking in terms of no real economic importance for the most
part.
The economic areas of most concern will be the adaptation to
cold. Macadamias once they get hurt from cold take a long
time to set out new growth, depending on how much wood
we had to prune off or out. After the cold we had in December
it took the Macadamias I had until June to send out new growth
but considering the tree should have been killed outright at those
low temperatures back in December 1990, waiting until June to
see new growth is not so bad. It was the following cold spell the
next year that did my trees in as the new growth was not able
to harden off when the trees got hit again and that was it for them.
Had they been grafted as opposed to rooted cuttings made me
wonder if I could have been able to help them through the cold
but felt fortunate that I still had these trees after they endured
much lower temperatures than people were writing about that
these trees could handle. So failure in this case was progress
in its own way. We can do it to get these trees to withstand
much cooler temperatures but for me not in back to back
unseasonably cold Winters for here. Had I waited five years
later to grow these trees in the ground I'd still have them.
If I could have planted them in 1992 instead of 1987 I
would have been okay.
Jim
