@haldog
Nice seedlings. I’ve heard passiflora germination can be unpredictable. Did you cold-stratify these, or just stick them straight in the dirt?
I’ve been meaning to write up my observations from the my first year of growing them. Just picked my last one off the vine today.
@tjasko The germination has been unpredictable. I planted 18 cells, each with 4 fresh, clean, non-stratified seeds. I used a seed starting mix, a heat mat, and a greenhouse “dome” for constant moisture. Out of those 72 seeds, 7 germinated within a week. I put them under lights and waited. No more germinated in the next couple of months.
A couple of weeks ago I transferred the seedlings to bigger pots and an improved grow light. Almost immediately more seedlings started coming up. Enough wait time? Better light? The weak liquid fertilizer I used when transferring? No idea. Several, but not all, of the pots have all 4 seedlings up. Others still have only the 1 original. No consistency at all, but the fruit have so many seeds, so no big deal.
Haldog,
Your Maypop seeds finally sprouted today!!!
Some of them I tried to germinate in a humid plastic bin filled with soil media this past winter. Those seeds never did anything.
Another batch of seeds I kept in a sealed plastic ziplock (no added moisture) for a few months. Eventually, I put this batch in the fridge to cold stratify for another few months. I planted and watered these into a pot a couple weeks ago, just as the really hot rainy weather was coming on. Today they germinated!
I hope you’ve got time to grow them to fruiting this summer. I’m looking forward to hearing how they taste.
My only advice is they don’t like pots. I potted my seedlings up to one gallon pots. They seemed happy for about two weeks, then they just languished. I watered and fertilized, moved some outside while keeping others inside, and finally planted some in the ground. They didn’t look pot bound, but within 2 days they started to look better. Within a week they were putting on a bunch of new growth and looked much healthier.
Thanks for the tip, and thanks for the seeds.
I’ll put some in the ground…
Haldog,
Today, I finally put some of the Maypop seedlings into the ground in my backyard.
I’m saving some to keep in the pot. And I’m saving some others to plant on a separate property that I own. I’m scattering them around to hedge my bets.
The wild ones here are not even worth the time spent to pick from the fields, and really have to wait until the fruit starts to shrivel before any juice develops around the seeds. It’s a nice flavor, but very tart prior to the fruit start to wrinkle and minimal juice, I consume some each year, just out grazing, ans spitting. You would need a bunch to process off the juice
My vine has been shooting a lot of blanks this year. The fruit looks good on the outside, but inside it’s empty seeds with no juice sac. I have two theories:
It was dry this year, enough that the vine stopped making flowers for a little while. Maybe it also aborted seed development during that period.
This is what self-pollinated fruit is like. I didn’t manually pollinate much, leaving it to the many carpenter bees. My vines are far enough apart that maybe they didn’t cross-pollinate so much as trick the flower into thinking it had been pollinated by itself.
The Maypop passionfruit seeds @haldog sent me last year survived this past winter in a pot. They are nice and green now.
Edit: This is in my fenced z7a city backyard.
Can anyone send me Maypop seeds or seedlings?
The beautiful plant I grew from Haldog’s seeds died when I moved this past year. 
Silver lining: Now I have a place to grow them in blazing sunshine if I can get my hands on some…
I don’t have any seeds right now, sorry. The Frittilary butterflies keep eating almost all of my plants. I’ll try to gather some up this year.
Passionflower is a tincture my mother often takes to relax from stress/anxiety. So the bees are probably noticing the effects and chilled out lol
