Doan's nursery in Belt line road in Irving has many cocktail fruit trees. I would suggest to check this nursery for fruit trees, flowering plants and tropical plants. Be prepared to wait to get help and also make sure that you are getting the right plants because many of the plants don't have labels/pricing. I also noticed that many fruit trees are from California growers, so not sure how they would grow in DFW. Moreover, they do not give any kind of warranty to the trees.

Fruitnut, I have 2 methods and I'm sharing my trade secrets here (what the hell- I'm 6 months from 60 and hope to retire in 25 years anyway). I start some plants straight in the ground, planting them way too close in a fenced off area. Planting them close makes maintenance per plant much less expensive given that it's all done by hand (don't ask). For apples in my climate it takes about 3 years to size them up to about 1.5" diameter- at least when planted this close. I carefully dig up these BR and put them in short 20 gallon pots (wide and shallow) in a mix of 1 part peat, 1 composted wood chips or stable waste ( almost pure humus with some carbo lumps) and 1 sand, plus a little wood ash. They limp the first season but I sell them the next for around $180 per. At this point they are bearing, 12' tall and well branched and the foliage is back to mormal. Other trees I transfer to Carl Whitcomb grow bags in real soil and let them grow about another 3 years and sell them for $250 per, or less to contractors. The grow bags I use are his last edition because they allow more root out of the bag and I can grow them without any irrigation at all- even through drought. Irrigation would reduce production by about a year, I'm sure, but in my operation only my potted plants get any and they are set in the soil as well. I always take some trees in the grow bags, remove the bags and put them into 25 Gallon pots with the soil intact but surrounded by my potting mix which allows me to sell some larger trees during the growing season. Surprisingly the soil surrounded by potting mix works very well and you might want to try that method for your trees as the soil gives you much more bang per square inch and costs less. Repotting would require only replacing the artificial soil on the edge of the soil ball. It makes things real heavy though, and my soil is not too fine so I don't know how it would work with a more clay soil but I bet it would work just fine. I'm sure my prices seem outrageous by your regional standards but I'm less than an hour from NYC and here it's more than competitive- it's the best deal around- because I have scores of varieties and they're actually properly shaped for fruit production. They also plug in better than the competitions BB'd trees, especially the ones I have in pots.

Indeed I have, if you mean Casimiroa edulis. ASU doesn't have a botany department, and their plant sciences have been steadily going downhill. They still have some great professors in plant bio but I've heard that a lot of good ones retire or leave and aren't being replaced. Pretty much the same is happening with the arboretum; a lot of plants listed online have died and not been replaced. In one case I found a healthy Bauhinia lunarioides which was recently removed for mysterious reasons. I noticed sadly that I was the only Plant Biology major listed in the commencement program.

Lily, can you provide a photo of where this wickedly thorny branch is emanating from? The front normal branch is obscuring where the thorny branch is coming from. We are all thinking that you've possibly got a (massive) rootstock sucker, but we can't tell unless you can give us a photo of where this branch starts exactly. If it is emanating from below the graft union, it is rootstock, and should be removed. Patty S.