Now look at these beautiful fruits. This is the Hawaiian Guava and this particular one
is the Pink Supreme and it's a cutting grown selection. Now the Hawaiian Guava is famous
for these beautiful pink fruits and they have a wonderful aroma so even just coming near
the tree you can get that beautiful smell of fresh Guava and you cut them open and it
just fills the surrounds so they are a really delicious aromatic fruit. They use these to
make Guava juice but they're also delicious eaten fresh off the tree and they hide inside
these green fruits so when you look at the tree it just looks like it's covered in green
fruit but once they start to slightly go yellow you can usually just touch them and they'll
fall off when they're ripe and you'll get stacks of guavas off one tree so they're really
productive and they're great in fruit salads and juices and really wonderful just eaten
as they are so I love this particular guava it's my favourite of the guavas. I like the
colour and like the flavour and I also like the tree. So they are a tropical tree they
do best in the tropics or the subtropics and do prefer a frost free position if you look
inside the tree you'll see they have this beautiful ornamental bark so they are just
a really gorgeous plant to grow in the garden and you can prune it up to expose that bark
so you can actually see that in your garden as well because it is a true asset of the
tree it is really a beautiful thing to grow in pots because it's cutting grown so if you
have a nice warm position, good drainage, keep the moisture up to them when they're
fruiting and you'll pick a massive amount of fruit off one small tree. Now we've just.....
Paning just come down and joined us in the orchard and she's taking cuttings off this
Pink Supreme Hawaiian guava that we've just been looking at so what she's doing is she's
taking all of the tips off the trees and she's going to strike these as cuttings so this
is how we produce our pink supreme Hawaiian guavas which is a cutting grown selection
we'll go and visit Paning later today and she can show us how she actually strikes these
cuttings but that's basically what she's going to cut so she is going to cut all the tips
off this tree and hopefully she'll cut a few bits of fruit as she goes. So just preparing
the cuttings here the bottom leaves are removed and some of the other leaves are cut in half
and that actually reduces some of the moisture loss. They are then dipped into a rooting
hormone this is a clonex rooting hormone so that's a purple clonex and then the cuttings
will be put into this mix here and this mix is actually a perlite and peat moss mix so
the perlite has perfect drainage and the peat moss actually retains a bit of moisture so
we find that, that is a really ideal mix for root formation so the cuttings are just gently
pushed into that and then firmly pushed down so that holds them upright and the next really
important stage is to label our cuttings so these are some propagation labels that we
have so this tells us what it is that we're propagating it's the source so where the cuttings
have come from and who's done them and where they've been produced so the plants are then
labeled with those and they go into our propagation house to form roots. So this is in our propagation
house and these are Hawaiian supreme cuttings that were taken at the end of February so
that's just over a month ago and you can see in amongst them there's a few that have failed
most of them are actually a success so they're going to stay on these heated benches for
another month or so until we can actually see roots at the bottom of the pots and then
they will be ready to pot on into their own pots at that stage they go into potting mix
and get fertilised so it's not until they have their own root systems that we apply
any fertilisers to the cuttings. And this is the finished product so this is a cutting
grown Hawaiian Guava Pink Supreme and you can see that it's already flowering and this
is the advantage of a cutting grown plant so they do flower and fruit much quicker than
a seed grown plant. This is basically a miniature mature Hawaiian guava and it's going to produce
the same fruit that the Parent tree had and it's going to produce that fruit much quicker
than a seedling plant would. So they're is lots of advantages of growing a
cutting grown selection.