Please, Please, and triple please

Does anybody have any Lignonberry seeds or know where I can get some. I want to grow some for an experiment and googled every which way I can think of with no luck. If anybody has any , I would be glad to trade for something and pay postage. Or please somebody direct em to a link that has them, I would be so grateful.

Thank you!

There is a lot of information on LINGON berries, but I have not found a US distributor. It is a native of Northern Europe and some experimenting is going on in the Pacific northwest so some nursery in that area must be selling it it. Does not sound like a plant for Alabama tho.

Try Raintree Nursery - http://www.raintreenursery.com/catalog/producttype.cfm?producttype=Lingonberries

Yuska

FarmerDill.... Your right. It doe s not sound like a plant that would normally grow down here at all and mainly that is because of the cold chill requirement. I have talked with several of the fruit and nut Professors at school and with the way my property conditions are and a little manipulation, it just might be possible. I am gonna give it a try. I also want to try some cross breeding to see if I can find a seedling that will need a bit less cold chilling hours for down here yet retain its fruit sweet content.

I would have never thought that people would be growing shrimp farms in the middle of some heat and drought states away from the ocean either, but darned if they aren't doing it and are successfully harvesting some nice catches of crops from it too and make a small fortune at the markets too with their fresh shrimp. Wish I could remember which state it is. They had an article about it in eithe r the Growing or one of the other horticultural magizines.

The one professor said he thought he had seen Lingonberries growing in New York, but it had been so long since he had last seen them, he couldn't be sure.

I need so many plants, I was hoping to find some seed as the plants are so expensive. Which I Thank you Yuska for the link. If I don't find any other source I may just have to get some from them.

Maybe either of you or somebody else knows the answer to this. The only other thing I thought of was maybe writing off to a manufacturer of the jams and jellies. They have to start out with the berries at some point. Those berries may have been transported in cooled trucks and probabbly have gone through some sort of washing and seperating procedures, but even with that do you think, if I could get a few berries from them that there would be viable seed in the berries that could be planted?

Starlight, its not the cold chill that is the problem, it is their inability to take the heat. Supposedly they are similar to cranberries in how they don't like heat. I tried to grow cranberries for several years in my 6A/7B heat and just watched them fry, so I think lingonberries would be very hard for you to grow. People in New England are able to grow them better and I bet there is some way you could get them to grow if you applied enough tricks (e.g. cover the soil with aluminum foil to reflect the heat, plant in dappled shade, etc). I tried cranberries in various degrees of shade here and did not get it to work. I have about 30 different types of fruit successfully growing now, and cranberries are my only failure.

My suggestion is to buy some plants from Raintree or other place (Edible Landscaping, Pinetree, etc) and see if you can keep them alive for a couple years. Or, quit trying to swim upstream and plant a crop more suited to your climate. Of the vaccinium the Southern Highbush blueberries are your best bet, they should grow well and fetch a good price. Some of these are very tasty thanks to recent breeding programs, e.g. Ozarkblue and O'Neal.

Scott

Starlight, Scott brings up an important point. The American Horticultural Society developed the heat zone map to complement USDA's hardiness map. (The heat zones also consider other factors such as elevation, humidity and wind velocity.) The contrasts for some parts of the country are striking. Here, for example, the hardiness zone is 8b, but the heat zone is 9. Nurseries in the
maritime Pacific Northwest - such as Raintree - are usually zone 8 for hardiness, but summers are much cooler averaging out around zone 5. Thus crops like lingonberries can grow happily. When summer temperatures stay consistently above 86 degrees, permanent cellular damage occurs in certain plants. In heat zone 9 we have more than 150 days a year with those high levels. My attempts to grow fruits such as jostaberry and medlar have been dismal failures.

Quite likely your area is either heat zone 8 or 9. Here is more information about heat zones - http://www.ahs.org/publications/heat_zone_map.htm

Yuska



This message was edited Dec 4, 2006 3:17 PM

Indiana Berry & Plant offers lingonberries - http://www.inberry.com/index2.html

I'm a AHS Heat zone 7 here in KY - Yuska's probably right that you're an 8 or 9.
Even gooseberries don't do well here unless I can put 'em in a shady spot.

Before I get started here. First let me apologize FamerDill and anybody else if I sounded rude with my shrimp comment. I did not mean to be , but thought all day in class that maybe I came off that way. I was just thinking about the fact that one professor said if you can dream it you can grow it and had told us the story about the farmer tired of losing his crops every year and to save his farm went into shrimp production. So I am sorry if I sounded rude or abrupt .

Besides all the other stuff I grow, Lingonberries is my dream. For years I have been dreaming about growing Lingonberries and with all the other plants I have growing and learnign to grow , I just didn't have the time.

Being a Northerner I got hooke d on them when I worked at an IHOP restraunt more years ago than I care to remember. Ever since then I have been hooked on them. Once a month I make a special drive to town just to go to the local IHOP and and order Lingonberry crepes and pay a fortune for half a dozen little melon scoops of Lingonberry butter to bring home for my biscuits, pancakes, french toast and just as a treat to eat. I am as bad as a two year old, I want my own little Lingonberries and lots of them . My canner saya it will gladly make fresh Lingonberyy jams for toast in the morning if I will grow them. LOL

After reading everybodys posts, there is lot s of good points there. I will tell ya why I think I might be able to grow them here. I am a border line zone 8a/8b, and summer down here is 100 days when the temps are over the 86F. During that time the temps usually hover around the 90 to 95F. I agree, way to hot to try and grow them in a normal yard, but my yard is not normal.

About 35 years ago the are a I am in used to belong all to one person and they had cattle, or maybe ya say it as cows, but it wasn't open cleared range, it was full of trees, oaks, hickories and pines. The cows would wander just more or less wher e they wanted. When the farmer died, the land just sat here and sat here and grew up wild. His wife was unable to care for it and when she passed on a relative sold it to a developer. Who divided it all up into 2, 3 and 5 acre plots. No crops were ever grown on this area so the soil was never limed. The ph on my soil ranges from 4.2 to 4.4 generally.

The property here is weird, orginally gotten for all the trees, over 200 hundred on two acre. But while my neighbor s have fairly flat land, I am in the bottom of the inside of a "U" the temp at my place is always lower than the my neighbors. On cold days, I will be the only out scraping frost and ice off my windshield. When you pull down the drive you can feel a major difference in temps. I am always cold.

I have lowbush, highbush blueberries, blackberries, strawberries, wild muscadine all growing and hundreds of wild blueberry plants that have colonized and are growing all over the front of the yard under the trees. In the front there is about 100 or so trees. Those trees are not coming down, gotta have trees, so I am looking for other alternate crops too to grow under them. Other areas on the property are dedicated to flower and vegatables. The majority of trees Loblolly pines and tall Oaks intermingled so much so that they form a forest-like canopy Besides being at a lower latitude, the Oaks cool the temps and the Pines let in filtered sunlight.

With the ground never being limed and year after year letting the oaks and pines build a natural mulch I have an O horizon now that is about 18" deep then have a couple of feet of a sandy loam, more sand than anything, and then I hit sandy clay and clay at about 3 and half feet down. So I figured I have a good organic mulch, the sandy enough soil, the low pH definately and the trees to maintain cooler temps during the heat of the summer.

I know if I went even a mile round the corner, I wouldn't be able to even attempt to grow them, They would be doing like Scott suggested and fry the difference in temps from there to here is that great.

Thanks for heat zone link. I checked out Zone 5 and it looks like I have about 60 days more than them of heat days, so the problem I see is going to be a way to develop keeping the plants cool enough during that time period.

But if I am understanding the growth habit right, the crop is harvested during August and September which is generally the hottest months here.

The idea of aluminum is very clever and I wonder if a white grow cloth on the ground would help. I have never used white before , only the black.

I am going to do like you all suggested. I am going to buy some plants and give it a try. I'll never know if it is possible or not if I don't try.

Also, since they are in the same family, I want to try and cross them with the wild and highbush berries. If I can get seed pods to develop and I can try and do some embryo rescue and tissue culture the plantlets to see if anyseedlings would develop and one that maybe would have the heat resistance of the blueberry down here.

I wonder if the heat situation gets to the point that it would become critial at the 86F stage, would it be possible to maybe creat small row hoop houses a few feet taller than the plants and blow cooler air from a fan over them? Has anybody seen or heard of such a thing?

Of all the places you folks have suggested is there one of them that is better than the other?

I appreciate all the advice and help. Thank you for sharing!

I think it is wonderful that you are willing to experiment and strive to accomplish your goal. You might be able over time to get the plants to adjust to the conditions of your garden spot's micro climate. Most of us have taken chances at times, and even though it seems the success rate isn't satisfactory, we keep trying - "nothing ventured, nothing gained."

We didn't comment on your idea of contacting the suppliers of jam and jelly to ask for seeds. Certainly won't hurt to ask; my hunch is that the fruits are cooked whole and the seeds are strained out afterward which of course would destroy viability. But maybe someone would save a few of the fresh fruits for you just to collect the seeds.

Please keep us posted on how your plans are progressing.

Yuska

star,
I wasn't trying to discourage you.
I 'push the envelope' all the time - frequently failing, but sometimes succeeding with plants 'experts' have told me wouldn't work here. And, some survive, but just barely.
Give 'em a shot.

I really appreciate any ideas any suggestions anybody has. I got my bulbs, my annuals, and perennials and trees and it is time to start to work with and learn to grow other fruit trees and bushes here to round out my yard. The back is devoted to woody trees and shrubs and the front I want to make like a small orchard, and if I need more room, I can always se e if the guy next to me will give me part of his land.

I went took a fruit tree and nut production course a few years ago, just so I could try and learn, and while it was very informative and helpful, it dealt mainly with just what is common here, and of couse, I want to try the uncommon for the area. There just so much more good fruit to eat besides apples and peaches and I want to try them all. LOL There just so much to learn about each one of them, how to grow em, prune em, and disease prevention and not enough hour s in the day to work outside with Nature and then spend hours and hours googling.

That why I am so thankful for the internet and threads liek here on Dave's. Ther e is nothign better than getting first hand experience from other growers and understanding the problems and successes they have had. You can read research papers all night long , but it doesn't have that real human , striving for the best and healthly plants and trees feel that conversations on the threads have.

Lucky... Nope didn't think that. Just figured if I explained what I had going on here, that maybe there might be more suggestions. Am I gonna have problems trying? Oh ya!!!! And you can bet I will probably be here picking everybodys minds as to what to do.

I never take offense at ideas or suggestions or thoughts. To me it al some of the best learning ever. I just like to make sure I try not to offend anybody. Sometimes my hands type and send before I realize what I have wrote.

Don't think I ever ate a gooseberry, now I have to se e if I can find one to try. Had to google to see what Yuska's jostaberry and medlar were. Seems my taste buds are missing lots of goodies. : )

Have you thought about putting in a pond?

I've been toying with an idea for a while now without the money to actually try it out yet. I love a lot of cool-season vegetables - peas, salad greens and the like. But we get rather hot here too in the summer, so the growing season for cool-season things isn't very long. I was thinking if I created a pond and planted my cool season crop near it - either on an 'island' in the middle or maybe inside a 'U' shaped pond - then the water might help to keep the area cooler for them & I might get more of a harvest.

Just a thought, anyway - like I said, I haven't yet tried it.

Starlight, do you have any pawpaw trees? It's a native fruit and may be growing wild in your area. I planted 2 several years ago, but one died and I haven't had cross pollination for the one that is doing well and blooms.How about persimmons? The native American types are astringent but quite tasty after a freeze. Some of the Japanese types are non-astringent and can be eaten while still firm. I want to grow the edible passionflower - I like the juice. And elderberries are great for jelly. Yuska

I am in Alabama in zone 7b just south of Birmingham.

I tried lingonberries. 3 plants lived a couple of years but never produced and I decided not to try again. Also I tried sea buckthorn but it succumbed quickly to disease, probably fungal. But there are so many things that do grow well.

The edible plants that I am growing successfully are asian and american persimmons, blueberries, paw paw trees (though haven't produced yet); mulberry, wintergreen (yes, wintergreen which I throught was a northern plant...it's slow but growing); apples, peaches, pears & Plums, crabapple, wild cherry, cornelian cherry (type of dogwood); kiwi vines that I planted last year doing well but whether they will produce I will see. Pecans and hazelnuts and figs are doing great too. Have you considered serviceberries? My trees are thriving and are easy to grow. Mine came from Musser Forests.

I haven't been very successful with cultivated grapes but my neighbors grow them. Wild muscadines are thriving however.

I also think it is cool that shrimp farming is taking place in central Alabama using inland wells. What will Auburn University researchers come up with next?

Backyardzoo.... yes, I have but to the extent, that becaus e I am so much lower than everybody else, I get all the natural runoff from everybody. Up behind me has a pond that naturally developed froma natural spring somewhere in the ground there. The runoff from the ground plus the pond runs right traight down almost inthe middle of my backyard, gathers in major pools in the middle of my drive then continues on in a path to acros s the street through his yard.

I am diggign it otu deeper and gonna put bridges to cross back and forth over it, and got ideas from the tree and shrub forum for shrubbery to plant back there.

I don't know about it cooling your crops, it could have an adverse effect. The water might help rais e the humidty levels up high enough to promote fungi on your crops. Think I would contact an extension service first, especially since they so much money or in my case, back breaking work digging.

Yuska... No pawpaws yet but gonna have some, I had been looking for seed for over a year and a friend sent me some a few weeks ago as a surprise gift and I have them in soil in the fridge chilling. Plus I also found a tree and gathered more seed, so I am happy. I thinking about takign some cuttings off the tree I found, but haven't searche d yet to see how to propagate them or if they even can be. I hope my seeds sprout. I anxious for the time to go by.

Whe spring comes, I will get a definate id on the exact cultivar of Passion flower I have in my yard. Mine has been growing wild here for years and years. I leave it for the butterflies to feed on. It makes lots of pods, but I just haven't had the nerve to try and eat it yet. Maybe it because while I have heard they can be eaten I have never meet anybody who actually has. With the way my luck goes, I would get a bad one. If mine is edible I can send you seeds from the pods. We tried digging up and transplanting soem of the plant oen year into 1 gallon pots, but none of the plants made it. Could have been the pH of the soil was too high, since at the time we used a potting mix.

I have been told I can get get cuttings of both the American and Fugi Persimmon to start. Again, need to fidn out when the best time to do this and how to get them to root. I need to get a homemade mist system built.

Passiflora, I have tons of wild muscadien vines all over the place, but have only had one section of vine produce and it is all tangled and wrapped around in my big American BeautyBerry Tree. I was tryign to cut back some of the vine from the tre e in places I could when I discovered last year that for the first time, the vine produced fruit. Now I am in a pickle, save the tre e that been growing for 16 years from a seed, or leave the berry vine and harvest just a few berrie s to eat each year. Was hoping that there a way for the two do live together with out choking the other one out.

What does it take to get all thes e wild muscadine s to produce. geez you woudl think with the tons of plats growign all over, somebody would giv e me a berry or two.

I was down by think it Salem AL. or somewhere near by there, forget the town name. They have this grape that is the size of a raisin. Need to find the name of it again and get some of those vines growing. Those of us explorign the orchard and looking at all the different fruit crops, saw these grapes, took piece s of paper and made paper cones and fille d them with these fruits and munched while we observed and note d the other crops. These were some of the juicest, clean, fresh sweet tasting grapes I have ever ate. Once you started you couldn't stop and oh yes we all went back for seconds. : )

Gotta google service berries, sea buckhorn and service berries. new ones to me.

Dr. Dozier, down here has developed a beautiful new muscadine. Not sure if they are realing it this year or not.

I also need to fidn out when is the best time to take cuttings of an orange and grapefruit tree. Believe it or not, down from one of my friends house they have both trees plante d side by side right next to the hous e in the middle of the city. These trees are taller than the two story house they reside against. They been there for ever due to health problems the person living there had to leave to live with a relative. The new folsk that move d in have no ide a what a treasure those trees are. They just having fits with the fruit fallign on there vechiles. I am afraid they are going to remove thos e trees and I would like to save as many cuttings as I can of both, so if somebody has experience with starting orange and grapefruits, I would appreciate it.

Starlight, when you transplant passiflora seedlings, be sure to get a section of the carrier runner from which the young plant is springing up. It is a white cordlike underground root that travels widely. If you leave three or four inches of it attached to either side of the base of the shoot, the transplant should be successful.

So sad about the citrus trees being in danger. I've read comments about young growth being easy to root, but can't seem to find details on doing it. I think I'll experiment with some cuttings from my tangerine and lemon trees. Yuska

Yuska... Thanks for the passiflora tip. Maybe thats what was wrong. Will give it another try when it gets warm enough here.

I ate a bunch of Satsuma oranges, first tiem for them. Yummy, and they each had one seed in them. I saved the seed. Since you have tangerines, do you think it possible to grow them maybe from seed?

Yes, it is possible - in fact citrus seeds sprout rather easily. Much of the citrus available in nurseries is grafted onto hardy orange rootstock in an effort to help the trees endure a wider range of colder temperatures, but own-root trees often do well. When I lived in so. California in a 9a location, I planted seed from a blood orange and grew two trees. The fruit was delicious. Tangerines, Satsumas, Meyer lemons and kumquats can take more cold than regular oranges. If own-root trees do freeze badly, they can sometimes regrow from the roots where grafted trees can't come back except in the nonedible form of the hardy rootstock.

Citrus orchards in some areas of Florida have been heavily damaged by canker. Your area is probably safe since the place down the street has those healthy trees.