Anyone here growing passion flower? Im thinking of pounding in some stakes and planting 2 for extra bee forage. How do the fruit taste?
I have a small but growing Passiflora Edulis,whose seed came from a fruit,given to me by Bill Merrill in Fremont,CA.The fruit was one found on the ground,while I was visiting and he was showing me around his backyard garden.The condition wasn’t very good,so I can’t say it was a prime example of what they can really taste like in peak ripeness.
I saved some seeds though and this will be the plant’s second year and hopefully a fruiting one.I brought the pot inside and put it in a window facing South, with indirect light,through levelor blinds.There are new leaves forming and when the temperature rises some more,I’ll give the roots a bigger container and let the vine spread on some tomato netting in a greenhouse.
This is a purple fruited variety. Brady
I’ve got incarnata in the ground and caerulea, vitifolia, lavender lady, capsularis and incense in pots. In pots I gat a few to ripen, but not every year. My in the ground one has only once in 10 years ripened fruit.
When people walk by this is the first plant they notice and the comment is always the same, “is that real?”
Scott
There’s a long thread about passionflowers from last year.
All of the native fruit have a distinctive taste, but some are very good and some aren’t worth eating. I know that sounds contradictory, but that’s my experience.
1 Like
I have (or had, if I cleared so much are that I destroyed them all) naturalized ones through areas here. They aren’t maypops, but have grown from some cultivars I planted several years ago. They fruited bucket loads last year. The best ones have a Hawaiian punch scent when fully ripe. They can be tasty, but aren’t sweet.
Last spring I also planted the same type @Richard has. The earliest fruits disappeared. The late fruits took a long time ripening once it wasn’t so hot out and they were also getting too much shade at that point. I cut it way back to bring in for the winter before they were ripe. It cost me too much to take the chance of losing if it got too cold.
Bumble style bees and some butterflies love the flowers of all that I’ve grown. I’ve never seen honeybees on them. So, if you want to attract ‘bees’ as a general term, they are good for that. If it’s specifically honey bees that you want to provide for, as far as I’ve seen, they don’t work well.
I’ve been growing them for a couple of years, mostly for the cool flower, but always hoping for fruit. I haven’t had much success though. Part of the problem is I lose interest or forget or have too many other things going on and I don’t get the fruit at the right time. Part of it may be that I’m a little too cool to get them to ripen in time.
Most of the ones I’ve tried have been under ripe and not quite ready. Every once in a while I’ll get a decent one, but that’s the problem - - - it’s only one small fruit.
The one thing you should know is they don’t stay where you want them. I started with 2 plants about 10 feet apart below a raised deck and now I have vines popping up all over the place, nowhere near where I planted them or where I want them!
Thanks Bart. Do passion flowers spread by runners similar to blackberries? Sounds like that could be a bit of a mess if they do. 
In my climate and soil, it is unbelievable how quickly they grow. I always joked that whatever was in our soil was the absolute ideal ph, nutrient level, etc… for passionfruit. We had it planted along our fence and it started off 16 inches tall. 12 months later, it completely covered a 6 foot tall x 14 foot wide fence. It was starting to get pretty unruly and required constant pruning. Underneath the green leaves and vines were huge masses of brown areas. We had probably 200 fruit from it last summer/fall. I liked the taste but it isn’t something I eat out of hand, like a plum or apple, so we ended up just storing all the pulp in the freezer. There were only so many smoothies and passion fruit bars we could make out of it. When we started having rats hide in the dead underneath brush, eating the fruit that was hidden and old, we removed the whole thing.
Honey bees are all over our passionfruit. They love the passionfruit and citrus in my yard and stay away from our pluots/plums 
I may be off on my terminology, but I don’t think they spread by runners. (I think of runners as spreading above the soil line like strawberries). These guys just come up where ever they feel like it. They just pop out of the soil all over the place. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it, like a slow expansion year after year. They pop up in any and every direction.
Are they coming up from seed or from root sprouts?
Root sprouts I think. When I “pull them up” I never see roots. The vine just sort of breaks off at the soil level, which probably puts out another one which I try to remove a couple weeks later!
1 Like
Yes. When I bought them, I was specifically looking for the edible species. I can’t remember exactly where I got them (2 possible places) but both sellers have the Incarnata species.
1 Like
Thanks, good to know. My only experience is with P. edulis and P. quadrangularis - neither of which I’ve seen develop root sprouts.
I’ve found several maypop seedlings around my yard this year. So far they are all in places where I spread compost, so I think they are spreading that way, and not via bird. Now I need to to find a good place to transplant them, just to see what the genetic lottery did to their fruit.
My seedlings have done very well, but right now what I’m mostly raising is a very healthy crop of gulf fritillary butterfly caterpillars
You can see the caterpillar damage on the leaves in the top right of the photo. I ate one of the fruit today-very tasty, but very seedy. About twice as large as a golf ball.
1 Like
You’re lucky. My main vine is infested with Japanese beetles, who particularly like to eat the flowers.