Yep, my understory Haden mango here in 9b grows slowly compared to my full sun mango. I am cool with it though because it never takes frost damage even when other mangoes in the area freeze back to the ground. It produced for me last year for the first time which I was very happy about. Based on my experience, planting bananas in a mature understory is a sound approach for zone 9b. You just need to give them a lot of organic material to grow in like wood chips. My understory bananas have a decent amount of cold protection during the winter and they produce yearly. If I was further south I, however, wouldn't use an understory. Thanks for the great content!
Very good point mate. I only plant my cacaos, Cupuaçus and mocombos under existing forest. And I have thinned it out too. As you said, it's,all about light because that's where the sugar in the fruit comes from. In addition to that my soil is quite poor in phosphorus and most other major nutrients so the competition isn't just about light but also about essential nutrients required to produce a healthy plant and juicy fruits.
I used this exact philosophy on my property and on one half I left the trees to create some shade and on the other half, completely cleared. I really didn’t have oaks (pines), but knew there were some understory and shade loving trees I wanted to keep so they went on that portion and the sun lovers got the cleared section.
The real magic of syntropic systems is in growing forests on degraded land. But, there's so much land, in Florida at least, that is dominated by invasives it's ideal to convert the invasives to new production.
We bought an old orange groove 45k sq ft, in which we want to start to plant more trees and we found syntropic / agroforestry. My wife is saying we either have to hard prune or I am thinking of just removing them all together. We might loose some time on the oranges, but it might be worth it. The thing is, our oranges are ~7ft high, so there's a lot of sun everywhere. But they are not spaced properly, some trees between rows and many of them are just in a really poor state.
