That’s interesting. You’ve been growing them quite a while in the PNW. What’s the most extensive damage you’ve had and at what temp did it occur?
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Portland annual minimum lows have been getting milder the past 30 years, nudging us from hardiness zone 8b to 9a. In the past 30 years, we hit +11 twice, widely separated in time. On those occasions, eventual defoliation was nearly complete, but crops were normal the following autumns. The dozens of teen-temperatures have caused cosmetic damage rather than fruiting loss.
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Nikita Pineapple Guava, very small and I think I should have ripened it on the counter a day or two.
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At last, someone displays feijoa weight in ounces rather than grams!
1.1oz is smallish but worth eating. What did you base your “should have…” on?
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Having grown up outside the US, I get confused by oz, less so by lbs.
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Even having grown up inside the U.S., I’m confused by ounces! Whose idea was it to use the same unit to mean either weight or volume?? And it’s not even a precise enough unit for most things like weighing small fruit, or baking ingredients, so then you need to use fractions of an ounce (the “right” way) or decimal notation (the better way). For most things you don’t need anything more precise than the nearest gram, so can just deal with whole numbers.
I have my kitchen scale set to grams and use that for all my baking and such, it just makes sense!
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A most amazing thing is that even engineers here use fractional inches when referring to some things but decimal inches when doing everything else! 0.05" would be 50 thousandths and 0.2" would be 200 thousandths of an inch. But they would be equally conversant saying 61/128" or 11/64".
Quiz – Can you tell quickly without a calculator if 11/64 is greater or less than 200 thousands? Time’s running. tick-tock tick-tock…
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I think the main reason just had to do with what is reasonably easy to judge by heft. I can tell a pound pretty easily, and adding or removing an ounce is about the limit of what I can readily discern. Grams? Can’t do it by tactile sense, has to be mechanical.
That’s usually the stronger point of imperial, the units are a bit more natural. And they use fractions and superior base arithmetic, but that’s a different, much more tenuous argument.
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I think it could have been a bit sweeter. I initially weighed in grams 
.
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Well, you can still see if other Nikitas sweeten up on the counter by comparison.
Weight: I compare feijoa weight to chicken eggs. Standard large egg >= 2 ounces.
Each item is a similar size and shape.
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So we had some rain and wind, which I think knocked 2 off the tree prematurely. I’m going to let these sit for 2-3 days, but Takaka has dropped!
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Takaka is earliest usually and also largest and most productive among all varieties
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Are those bruises from falling on the ground?
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There’s a fence behind the trees. I think the wind kept batting the fruit against them…the ones higher up didn’t look the same…
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So there are even more takaka dropping now. But they are all extremely firm and lack the characteristic (i thought) smell of my seedlings. They look like an average of 70 or 80 grams apiece. They probably would have been larger if we hadn’t been in drought conditions for thr past 2 months. I will taste the first set this weekend once I find my brix meter…
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The coloring is a typical green on the others so the red coloring on the first 2 were bruising damage. The Apollo appears to be a month behind, so November looks right on queue for a mid ripening variety in the SouthEast…
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My Takaka aren’t dropping yet but seem larger — estimated 100-150 g each. I expect they will drop within 15 days.
Apollo is also large fruited but is currently a bit smaller than Takaka.
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I think I’ll chalk this up to a young plant. I tried 1 and it wasn’t that sweet at all. I’l have to find my brix meter to test the others. It had a Guava like taste, but the flavor just wasn’t there. Hopefully the next few will be better OR next year’s version. If Next year’s are like this, we might have to topwork this Takaka, which would be a legit shame and disappointment.
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My Takaka last year wasn’t very good compared with the mark Albert varieties. This year hopefully they will be better.
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The next Takaka I tried had a Brix of 14%, which is higher than I thought.
Some blah tangerines my wife brought from Publix were a 10/11 for reference…
I will say that the skin on the Takaka is very easy to eat with only a slight bitterness. If the pulp was more flavorful, I could eat the whole thing quite nicely.
From the Patent on Kaiteri, it only has a 12 Brix at Maturity (USPP22275P3 - Feijoa variety named ‘Kaiteri’ - Google Patents) , so not sure why the fruit isn’t wowing me…
My seedlings have a better flavor in my opinion, but are much more grainy and smaller.
I thinned my seedlings this year, so hopefully the size will improve…
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