I'm growing up eating sugar apple almost every week, at my parents yard, we have 4 big sugar apple trees, they are all the green yellowish type.
With my surprise, the seeds easily to germinated, since I believed this plant can't handle our winter cool, so I only keep 3 of them and toss the rest but still keep some of seeds if I need it later on.
On winter, every time the temperature below 50F, I'll moved it to my sun room, they still look suffer, loosed lot of their leaves but soon after the temperature get warm again, the new grown will start coming and after the third year, following with flowers... only few but made me excited and can't wait to see the tiny fruit at my trees, but it not happen ... after all the bloom falling, still no any tiny fruit.
At that time I though probably the trees just too young to bearing fruit and this spring it's happen all over again for 2 months, still no tiny fruit yet. So I looking at internet for the answer, I need do a hand pollination !
Sugar apple have a unique flowers, first open, it will be a female flower for about 24 hours and the next day it will become a male flower for only few hours. So you should be know when the male flower mature and ready. On beginning May at my zone, the male flowers mature about 2-5 pm but soon after the temperature getting hot, they mature earlier.
 |
| Female Flower Sugar Apple |
 |
| Male Flower Sugar Apple |
For beginning I'm using small brush for hand pollination but for some reason it doesn't work good for me, the pollen didn't really sticking at my brush, you need a natural brush maybe like from feather. So I'm trying used a cotton bud, just tuck and rubbered gently around inside male flower to pick up pollen and than stuck it into the female flower, also gently please and it worked !
With only a few left over flowers at the trees, and only for 2 weeks, my trees has have 12 tiny fruits, yeaaay..! For now, I need to stop hand pollination them until next year.
Thanks to 'eggo' at Gardenweb for his awesome explanation on how to hand pollination for cherimoya, you are rock :)
Since my trees still young and small, I hope they can handle take care their 12 tiny fruits until become mature.
And can't wait for my cherimoya seed to germinated, has been a week, still no sign yet.
