Rambutan looks like a fruit that wandered in from a cartoon: a bright red ball covered in soft, fleshy spines. Under those spines is one of the best things the tropics grows, a translucent white aril that tastes like a…
Jackfruit is the largest fruit that grows on a tree, and the biggest mistake I see growers make is treating a mature tree like it is drought-proof. A 15-year-old jackfruit will shrug off a dry spell that would kill a…
The sensor is the easy part. You can buy a soil moisture probe that runs five years on two AA batteries for under a hundred dollars, shove it in the ground, and it will happily report water content every fifteen…
Cut open a mangosteen from a well-run orchard and you get clean white segments, sweet with a faint floral note. Cut open one from a tree that got drenched right after a dry spell and the same flesh is shot…
Persimmons have a reputation for being tough, and the reputation is half the problem. The kaki persimmon (Diospyros kaki) is genuinely drought-hardy. It will shrug off a long dry spell, hang onto its leaves, and limp through a summer on…
The first thing to understand about drip irrigation for hazelnuts is that the tree is doing you no favors below ground. Hazelnuts are shallow-rooted. The bulk of the feeder roots sit in the top 30 to 45 centimetres of soil,…
Fig trees have a reputation problem, and it’s the reason drip irrigation for figs gets skipped more often than it should. Farmers see a fig clinging to a rock wall in Greece or shading a courtyard in North Africa, notice…
Macadamia is the highest-value nut you can grow, and also the easiest one to get wrong. Farmers plant it because the kernel sells for more per kilo than any other nut. Then they lose a chunk of their first crop…
When a single Musang King durian sells for twenty dollars at a market stall, drip irrigation for durian stops being a water question and becomes a harvest question. A mature durian tree sheds a third to two-thirds of its fruit…
A lychee tree looks tough. It is a tall evergreen that shrugs off the heat of a Guangdong summer and happily sets fruit in places where a peach would wilt. Underneath that leathery canopy, though, sits one of the most…
