Some of my fruits, perhaps 1%, attain the red blush of your unknowns.
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Someone needs to breed this red blush trait so that the fruit can be more easily spotted.
In the denser areas of my large bush, sometimes I just have to give it a shake and see what falls, much easier than trying to sight fruit that is leaf-sized, colored, and shaped…
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Next time I go over there, I’m getting a bunch of cuttings for grafting. It’s far better than every variety I grow. Not to mention the nice dark blush.
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Are you growing waingaro? I got one a couple of years back and just this week got the first ripe fruits. They are phenomenal for me, by far the best tasting compared to the seedling, Coolidge and nakita I have. The waingaro got round and very plump, before developing a reddish blush. Inside is mostly jelly, very sweet with a perfect amount of tart. I’m going to make many clones of this bush next summer and plant them all over the property. I left them on the bush for this recent cold snap and they were undamaged from several hours at 25 degrees.
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Just got Waingaro this year.
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It is fantastic. I got it from Restoring Eden.
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Does feijoa continue to ripen on the counter? I’ve bought some fruit this weekend and they are not as ripe as I’ve had in California before.
Yes! It ripens quite a bit on the counter. The late varieties can even keep for several weeks. Apparently the newest cultivars can keep for months.
Are these fruits from your tree? I picked a bunch last month from a tree in California and they were extremely good.
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I have read several times that deer are averse to browsing on the Feijoa tree. To those growers in areas with heavy deer pressure, if you leave Feijoa unprotected will deer actually avoid these trees?
Feijoa are extremely brittle trees. Even if deer don’t browse on them, they will easily be destroyed by deer just walking by them applying a little sideways force.
Ask me how I know.
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This same property also causes very long splits to form when you do a cleft graft. The first few times I tried to do them, I didn’t cut the scion anywhere near long enough to account for the deep splitting that would happen when the scion was inserted. After that, I started cutting very long/thin wedges on the scions, and those had much better take rates. The wood is definitely very prone to splitting and snapping.
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Thanks, good to know. No, these were bought a local market. Seller said they were brought from California.
Yes. I let fly quite a few curse words after my first time trying to graft these. The Persimmons and Jujube, I actually had to use a Mallet to tap the blade through. The Feijoa wood splits like dry rotted plywood…
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Would binding the area with twine (say 1 1/2" -2" or so) below where you intend to place the split for the cleft graft help solve the excessively long splitting issue?
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I just harvested my first 3 feijoa fruits from a 5 year old seedling bush. They are not very large but easily came off the bush when I checked them for firmness. Now, I’m not sure what to do with them; they are still quite firm. I’ve placed them at room temperature with some apples, hoping that they will soften up like kiwi fruits. Is that the right procedure? I never expected them to ripen, since they flowered in early July, which seems rather late.
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the vitog flower2harvest interval is nearly 5 months, that is within the normal range.
By “quite firm”, that can mean rock-hard, or carrot-hard, or some other firmness.
It the fruit deforms at all under hard hand pressure, it should ripen indoors.
The ideal firmness is eraser-hard (those large pink erasers).
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For reference, the earliest feijoas supposedly ripen in 112 days from flower. The latest can take 178 days.
This means that if they don’t flower by mid July, there is no fruit, even from the earliest varieties. This is what @LarryGene has been saying for a while now.
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