5.08 ounce feijoa, unknown variety, harvested here in Portland, Oregon the other day. This is only the 3rd 5-ouncer from this bush in 25 years, 3 ounces is large and the average is under 2 ounces. The record for this bush is 5.6 oz.
One Southern Hemisphere fresh fruit marketer ranks anything 2 to 2.8 ounces as “large”; “jumbo” is over 5.4 ounces, with intermediate sizes of XL, XXL, and XXXL
Very sad that my attempt to graft that bush onto mine didn’t work out, hopefully I’ll get a chance to try again some time! Did the heat wave around when they were flowering this year impact fruit quality?
The heat wave in late June (108,112,116 degrees) occurred just prior to peak bloom and well before any fruit expansion. Quality of the ripe fruit this year is normal.
One flowering bush in the neighborhood had fried remnant blossoms but no leaf damage.
I have not seen any leaf damage on other bushes in the area.
You are welcome to more cuttings sometime; there are a lot of lengthy sprouts from recent pruning points. I currently have two air-layer assemblies going, others from two years ago took 18 months to form visible roots inside the water bottle and these roots did not keep the cutting alive when transferred to a pot. The current two air layers are of younger sprigs.
Thanks! I had much better success with the scions from Marta that I had grafted in the first week of March, so I’ll reach out in February sometime.
Our one neighbor with a bush seems to have a decent crop for the small bush size, but they still haven’t ripened. They look about half-sized at best. The neighbor says that it usually has a few that ripen around now, but mostly they fall without ripening when it gets cold and dark. They don’t know if it’s a named cultivar, though.
Picked the last of the fruits today, an early wrap-up to the 2021 season.
I will eventually post harvest totals.
Final totals for 2021: 384 fruits weighed nearly 49 pounds.
The average fruit size of just over 2 ounces is a record for this bush.
Large fruits were: 2 over 5 ounces; 5 more over 4 ounces; and 29 more over 3 ounces.
I found a lone holdout. I’d put it in with some persimmons and an apple in hopes it might help the persimmons color up. It smells great. I’m wondering if I probably ate the others too early.
We’ll see. Maybe it will be overripe. It’s been on the counter.
Feijoa the firmness of a large rubber eraser are near-ripe and may be on the tart side. That is how I ship them and by the time they arrive, should be ripe enough. But then your shipment took only one day.
At the other extreme, if squeezing the feijoa results in a squishy sound, probably over-ripe with air voids forming inside. Fruit that falls from the bush are squeezable but usually quite firm.
That is a very large Pineapple Guava 
. I just learned about these on YouTube and I was interested in planting one. I found someone near me (Vial Farm in Hillsboro) that had them so I could see what they tasted like. They kind of taste like a floral sweet-tart.
The feijoas pictured above look a little scabby; most feijoas are a darker green and not scabbed; perhaps these are late-season pickings from Vial. I have heard from two people familiar with multiple varieties of feijoa that the Vial fruit is of average quality; that fruit would certainly give a fair indication of feijoa flavor. They were reportedly grown from seed. If purchasing, best to stick to named varieties.
I talked to a guy at One Green World and he said that the Vials got them from them and that they were seedlings (rather than a true variety). That is why there is so much variety. Also, we just picked these up off the ground to try so we weren’t very picky.
Interesting. My information is that the Vial bushes had an Argentine origin (from seed). One of the OGW people travelled to South America some years ago to explore feijoas there, so that may be the connection. The whole Vial hedgerow may be one giant experiment!
Mark, if you send me an email to plants at ledress dot com, I will make sure you get some fruit next year. I am also in Portland.
@LarryGene I may have misunderstood what the guy from OGW meant. Maybe they did not come from them. He said for sure that they were seedlings and that was why the sizes were all different - Pineapple Guava is not “true to seed”.
https://www.ehow.com/info_8327216_can-propagate-pineapple-guava.html
