Wow, I’m in zone 8a and my maypops are just starting to sprout.
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I think these got a little bit of an early start because 1.) they’re near a porch and 2.) I mulched them heavily over winter. When I pulled the mulch back this spring, I noticed that just a tiny bit of above ground stem survived. Some of the ones in more exposed locations—and that got little to no mulch—are sprouting back well enough from total topkill, but have no flowers yet.
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I’ve got a couple Maypop fruits ripening. One that pollinated a week or so ago, I noticed it got a bug hole in it and has started to turn yellow, so I picked it off and decided to open it up to see what they look like at that point. It was the size of a medium chicken egg and had two ants roaming around in there so I blew them out.
(DO NOT DO WHAT I DID BELOW — TOXIC)
There were seeds there attached to the walls with a bit of pulp around them already so I took a bite and they were soft like cucumber seeds and the pulp was faintly sweet like a cucumber as well. I read how some people eat the Akeba pods like a vegetable, so I went ahead and took a bite of the Maypop fruit/pod and I don’t think I’ve ever eaten anything quite like it. It was firm but chewy just as it feels in your hand but it has a sweetness to it that lands halfway between a cucumber and an apple. I mean, at least twice as sweet as a cucumber but tasted more like a vegetable than a fruit.
Unripe Maypop fruits contain cyanogenic glycosides, so probably not a good idea to eat them until seeds are darker and hard. The rinds may be even more toxic than the unripe arils. The less ripe the fruit, the more toxins. Most people find the unripe fruit very unpleasant tasting, so little risk of poisoning themselves.
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Oof, good call. I was going to look that up because I do have things like mayapples in my yard that I know are toxic, but dang, it tasted good to me! I wonder if the toxin could be boiled out….
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I found this on the ground today. It smelled like vanilla with Fruit Loops undertone. It tasted acidic like a passion fruit but kinda had a banana flavor to it.
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We have a special strain of passionfruit / Maypops that we sell, both seeds and plants. It is far better than average: Hardy Passionfruit Vines For Sale | Peaceful Heritage Nursery
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It’s interesting that one of the seedlings has suddenly died back in the greenhouse, even though the others in there seem happy enough (other than getting munched on by earwigs a lot):
The outside ones took the week of mild frosts and a few harder freezes in stride, though I’m guessing their tops at least will tap out in the hard freeze next weekend:
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Here in STL my larger maypop is still hanging in there and we have had several nights below freezing and even around 18F a couple nights. They won’t make it to spring but at least I know the roots will survive.
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We have a video on our special varieties of passionfruit we are developing here:
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Great looking maypops, Blake! There are some really good Passiflora genetics here in Kentucky. Some of the ones around here make large fruit. Had some tasty ones this year. I only wish all of them would ripen before frost! They’re always full of immature fruit when the first freezes take them.
@swincher Those ought to survive there just fine. They might indeed die back to the ground this winter, but they should pop back from the roots. Maypops seem to come back readily—even from root fragments. I let one get established in my gooseberry bed—and now, no matter how many suckers I pull, they pop up everywhere in there! Hope you get some blooms/fruit next year!
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Some of ours began ripening in mid-August this year. But indeed, much of it does freeze here in KY underripe. Picked mostly ripe they do seem to ripen indoors.
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I had been checking on the maypop down the road all summer waiting for ripe fruit. I finally found some about a month ago. Some of them were great, and some had a very unpleasant taste. I think maybe the unpleasant ones were overripe. I don’t think I’m going to bother growing them. Very little flesh and a whole lot of seed. Difficult to eat.
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because of the hard shell that has to be penetrated. I sanded them down with sandpaper until you could see something white.
This speeds up germination similar to banana seeds
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Overripe ones do taste bad.
In my opinion the best way to eat em is to just sloosh the pulp around and get some juice out and just swallow the seeds whole. Crunching them just seems terrible to me.
That being said, this past year I moved to almost exclusively juicing them in a mesh bag. Fabulous juice!
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I’ve sampled maypops on numerous occasions, from the time I was a child to the present. Never tasted one that made me want to eat another. But… I keep trying them.
I do think the flowers are quite lovely, though.
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I have sampled a lot of maypops. Many were spitters, some were occasionally good enough for a second taste or rarely two. I once found one that was good enough to eat the whole thing. Other than that one good one, they have all had an aftertaste that is often not that bad at first but after a few seconds just ruins the experience. You get a nice aroma and a couple of seconds of tropical fruit, then yuck. Kind of like pawpaw’s.
The maypop aftertaste seems to be recessive in hybrids, which can be very good, so there definitely is potential for improvement. I have created hybrids that are fully hardy with very good flavor, but most fruit is small and not well filled, so there is not much to eat. However, they can be very ornamental.
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I read about the Passiflora incarnata hybrid.
but according to the information should not be hardy. but I don’t know if it’s really been tested enough.
whether they bear small fruit… the main thing is a hardy passionfruit with a good taste.
I hope you keep breeding 
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F1 hybrids with tropical species are not fully hardy. However, F1 hybrids with some hardy species can be very hardy. Hybrids of P. incarnata with P. tucumanensis are usually hardier than either parent. My fully hardy hybrids are many generations beyond the F1 and do have root hardiness equal to pure P. incarnata. I’m not doing much with them now, but I have shared many with other breeders over the years.
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