Thanks for the very helpful response @LarryGene .
@JohnS ,
You should get into grafting. Fruitwood nursery has a lot of variety in Feijoa budwood if you can get in early…then you can have multiple varieties on your two bushes…
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Blustery weather overnight dropped a couple of small fruit. I heard one hit the deck at ~ 2AM.
Feijoa still dropping. Today I picked the largest of the season -Anatoki. 190g!
Last year I had a Kaiteri that was 250g
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I’ve finally eaten my first four tiny Feijoa fruits. I tried two of them about a week ago, scraping out the lighter colored flesh inside the skin. They had a very thin longitudinal tube of translucent material down the center, with flat, undeveloped seeds. There was barely enough of this material to notice that it was fairly sweet and nice-tasting. The rest of the flesh was off-white and pretty sour, but not excessively so.
I tried the other two today and decided to eat them with the skin on. The skin was quite palatable and didn’t seem to affect the overall flavor, which was about the same as the white flesh eaten earlier. I think that the taste and the size of the fruit will improve if I can cross-pollinate the flowers next year.
I still have two fruits ripening on the same bush from later-blooming flowers. It’s interesting to see them gaining reddish color this late in the season with termperatures hovering around the freezing mark. These fruits are on the south side of the bush, exposed to the sun; the earlier fruits developed deep inside the bush and were all green.
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Congrats!
In a few years you’ll have so many that you will actually wonder what to do with them.
I’m almost at that point this year. My fridge is full of them
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This is what all of mine look like and unfortunately of my 3 new zealand varieties one got girdled by rabbits and the other died in our crazy heat wave awhile back. I can’t catch a break with Feijoa.
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Swincher, is that weight really 3 grams? It looks about as long as my first fruits, but they weighed between 15 and 23 grams and were significantly fatter. Is it hollow and did you try to hand-pollinate it?
It was 3 grams! Not hollow really but also no flesh in it. I did try hand pollination, but only with other flowers of the same variety. Nothing else flowered at the same time. It didn’t have any viable seeds, so I’m guessing is self-incompatible or pollination failed for some other reason.
Of more interest to me was the 83.0 degrees. Not normally a temperature encountered (indoors or out) during feijoa season. Perhaps it was a leftover reading from another time.
The swincher feijoa could have weighed as much as 3.4 grams, if that is more impressive.
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The thermometer on the scale is broken! 
In that case, is the 00:00 clock or timer broken?
Well, I guess there must be a large range of fruit size from non-self-fertile Feijoas. I also only had flowers on one plant, hand-pollinated from one flower to another, but got much larger fruits, which had undeveloped seeds. Was your plant a seedling, like mine, or a named variety?
It is grafted, but the printed tag faded before I made a permanent metal one, so I’m not sure which Marta variety it was, it is either Oktoberfest or Cosmos. I have one known Oktoberfest on a neighboring bush, so I’m hoping to be able to sort out the unknown grafts by comparing to that eventually.
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Thanks for the variety info, swincher. I tried searching for the pollination requirements of the varieties you mentioned, but both Google, and Bing (AI search engine) failed to provide an answer. Do you know if either of those possible varieties is self-fertile (doesn’t need cross-pollination)?
They are both recent introductions from Marta, and I think up to this point they’ve only been grown in large mixed plantings with plenty of other varieties.
But also, I think there’s a tendency of some varieties to runt out their fruit in cool climates, based on what others in our region like Ram have said. Hopefully it’s something they will grow out of once they get larger, since this was the first time flowering since I grafted them.
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I’m still picking Abba and 8 ball. It seems that Feijoa will keep swelling and ripening well into winter if we are fortunate to not have a killing frost.
These are my current favorites for taste. They are so far superior to the NZ varieties in my specific climate.
But very late here. But they are early in California.
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