Lycheeluva,
Damn, I thought I was the only one scouring the internet at all hours of night. Fantasizing of my hammock that is tied to my a mango tree and a Moro blood orange. I feel your pain, except I have two mangoes that are dropping leaves and I am goin crazy trying to give them more light till my 1000 watt HID comes in. I haven't done the you tube thing but I am here all the time. I love the idea of goin in on a few acres in Fl for a joint effort fruit farm. I can't help ya with the madness problem cuz I AM TOO! What fruit trees are you growin? Once I geet my light up I can grow a lot more. That is what I do at the midnight hour! And I don't even live in a house! Imagine that!!
Andrew

I forgot to add that in one week I got 2 mango, 5 pineapple, and a plumeria. A week ago I started forcing bulbs to have more blooms during the bleak and miserable winter!!

i like lychees mostly because they are not very well known anywhere really north of here.

mangos are my favorite by far though. lychees are a runner up tied with anonas.

Lycheeluva

I feel the same way. I have a 5 month old so I spend a lot of time just nursing him and holding him while he naps. I spend a lot of this time on my blackberry.
I am also up at 3am every night and just search stuff on my blackberry. I read and re-read the same information over and over again.

I am trying to grow mangos, cherimoya, pineapples, kiwis and just scour the web for as much info as I can. If my plants don't die over the winter I am going to venture into longan, lychee territory. I think I can convince my husband to let me grow the lychee in our atrium.

The worst part is that I literally have a baby on my hip most of the day so my poor husband has to do all the work of moving the plants, covering etc.

I am also thinking of adding 1 or 2 mangos to the 4 I already have even though the chances of me getting ripe fruit from the trees is about 2%. Talk about being a dreamer.

My parents own some land in vietnam and my uncle actually has a lychee farm. I just need to go back during lychee season.

andrew- im growing lychees (3 mauritius, 1 hak ip, 1 sweetheart and plan on buying about 5-6 airlayers of rare lychee varities from Harry in the summer), 2 tangerine, 1 washington orange, 1 citron, 1 meyer lemon, 1 guava, 1 jaboticaba, 1 fairchild mango (plan on adding 1 mango in the summer), 3 camelias and 1 jasmin vine.

Tammy- where do u live- if u r in zone 9/10, why r u so pessimistic of getting your mangoes to fruit.
10-20 years down the road, im def buying a place in s florida with a couple of acres and will grow every frikkin tropical fruit tree under the sun, and every lychee and mango variety i can get hold of.

Gerry:

I wondered what the heck you were doing up worrying about the weather here in Florda and whether it would affect the lychee bloom cycle at 4:15 AM. You just have to accept the fact that you have been bitten by the tropical fruit bug and there is no cure short of frontal lobotomy (which I do not reccomend). This bug generally only bites us Southerners. There are only a few, very special people up north that this bug has any interest in. You should consider it an honor that "the bug" thought you were special enough to fly all the way up there just to taste your blood! Keep those crazy questions coming....it is my pleasure to answer them.

Harry

do it and dont look back.

i moved down here after inheriting my fathers small two bedroom house and started planting mango trees after one season all around the perimeter of my less than 1/4 acre lot.

i wish i had more land. my neighbors yard is empty, hes in his 80's, and literally on his last leg, doesnt care much for mangos though.

Gerry, I'm in northern california. We had a record low last week and got down to 29 and the winter has just started. Usually our winter lows are in 40 but we have had some freak low temps.

I think we all know what you're going through and feel your pain. Living in central FL, my biggest concern is the occasional frost we get here usually Jan/Feb. I obsess over it and worry about it even though there's nothing I can do to prevent it from happening.

What I need to do is move a couple hours further south, that will take care of most of my problems. I have a small piece of property close to Ft. Myers, maybe when DH retires and the housing market recovers we can move there and I can plant all the Mango, Lychee, Jackfruit I want,lol...NO grass just fruit trees. That's my ideal yard!

LL, just remember you are not alone, you're in good company
or maybe bad(for your sanity) that is! You definitely need to move here, you already know what you want to do...or should I say HAVE to do! Lots of great opportunities right now in the real estate market. Its a buyer's market for sure! You can probably buy 2 acres for what you would have been able to buy 1/2 acre 3-4 yrs ago. Especially south FL, great opportunities are ripe for the picking.

BTW, Looks like NO Lychee this year from my Sweet Cliff...its full of new GROWTHS **sigh**. Its this very warm fall we've been stuck in... I'm hoping the Sweetheart won't let me down this year(that's my only hope).

hehehe...somehow always this time of the year I want to get more tropical fruit trees. It's very exciting with the lychee blooms. They are growing bigger and bigger now. Now I have an interest in the Vietnamese apple and been crazy searching for info day and night. I'm like up in the middle of the night until 4-5 am sometime just reading about the trees I'm planting in PA. I know I have no more room but I still want more.

You're not the only one being obsessed.

lycheeluva, you are not alone. I don't know how many times I've youtubed lychees and other fruiting plants, lol! Many of us on this forum seem to love our Lychees, Mangoes, cherimoyas ect.... Have you ever thought about planting some Alpine strawberries or Mara des bois indoors to hold you over the winter. I recently ordered some and they are flowering right now. They need hand pollination indoors and this keeps me really busy. They are not like regular strawberries, they have super intense strawberry flavor but are very tiny, about the size of a dime or smaller.

lol, you're NOT MAD... I do the same thing at night when I cant sleep, googling or searching gw for pictures on my tropicals, from seedlings to trees, to flowers, to seeds, to bug/fungus problems... so much to do so little time hehehe :)

I'm currently living in Central Fl, but moving back to NY in the next 6 - 9 months. I definitely want to take some of lychees. Has anyone's lychee produced fruit up north?

You want o come back here? Are you sure?? LOL! None of my business. I just wish I lived there.....I'm in NY now. Definetly come back after winter, might as well skip the snow!
Andrew

Don't despair.

I cannot tell you how to produce lychees up in New York -- but I can tell you how to go about eating fresh lychees in NY.

I found the secret during August and September this year while I was up in Princeton. Driving between home and NY, we went by a Great Wall Supermarket. on Route 27 in Franklin Township (just south of Finegans Lane.)

Google it. The place is fantastic.

Lo and behold -- lychees and longans, piled high in the produce section. And, I think we paid $1.95 a pound -- but the price fluctuated a bit each time we returned.
And -- they are a chain, with outlets in NY.

They were delicious !!! The longans weren't as good -- to me, because they ripened too quickly.

We wound up freezing some of the last batch of lychees we bought and brought them back down to Florida when we returned here. We froze them whole. They did not lose too much of the flavor when we defrosted them.

So, I am growing a Sweetheart tree right now -- and it just had a tremendous flush of new leaves.

I am hoping, hoping, hoping.

Be well -- and stay warm.

(o_O)

very interesting brad- had never heard of the supermarket but googled them and found that there is a branch about 30 mins away from me. r you sure you found lychees there in august because lychee season is usually over the end of july. will try and check it out tomorrow

I bought them as late as mid-September. Then they ran out.

If you are a food lover, check out everything they carry. The vegetables and fish are fantastic. It is like being transported into the Far East.

If you have a yearning for live frogs or seafood -- that, too, is the place.

Be well

(o_O)

Hahahahaha...the "tropical fruit bug" does get around. I've been making a list more mango cultivars I need for next Spring. I've no idea where they will go in the Fall, but I'll worry about that when it comes. My lychees are growing fast, and I'll need to head them back soon...two are 6.5 feet tall right now...running out of ceiling space fast.