Many passionfruit vines are grafted, meaning they use the rootstock of a stronger variety to withstand disease. Prune off the suckers below the graft area and avoid ruining the root system.
As a guide, our commercial growers replant every three years to ensure they get optimal fruit from a crop. Prune your vine back so that it is not in the way of other plants. The best time to prune is in spring as new growth resumes.
Try cutting the base of the vine a few inches from the ground and spraying the vine with roundup or a similar herbicide. This website is funded through the Hort Innovation Passionfruit Fund, using the Passionfruit marketing levy. Hort Innovation is the grower-owned, not-for-profit research and development corporation for Australian horticulture. Privacy Policy. About » FAQs. What variety is best for temperate and tropical climates? Is it true you should try to grow vines north to south?
What area of my yard should I plant a passionfruit vine? What it gave me was hours of weeding out the suckers from one end of the garden to the next. It was then that I vowed never to get another grafted plant again but grow it from seed instead. So be patient if you try at home! Being a vigorous climbing plant, a passionfruit can take over pretty quickly and can be a pain to keep tidy if left unpruned.
I germinated the seed in spring and then planted the seedling into a mm pot to get a bit bigger. But for the first year I only got one long shoot. By the second spring, I planted my shoot out into the garden and enriched the soil with compost and mulch. This gets everything growing now and forms the framework for the entire plant. Pinch out the tip of the shoot and attach the side shoots horizontally to the vertical plane to encourage the main branches to grow.
These branches will alternate along the main trunk of the plant the bit that grew for the first season. By the third spring, i. These are the fruiting limbs finally! Flowers develop all the way down these limbs at the leaf axil. Let these limbs just fall in front of the main branches rather than letting them get tangled in with the rest of the plant.
This can become somewhat difficult with very opportunistic tendrils finding anything to cling onto as soon as they touch it. You should bear fruit from this lateral growth every year now. You want to now trim back all your lateral growth from last season to about 3 leaf nodes.
By doing this you shorten the laterals back close to the main branches. The laterals will start to put on growth with a vengeance, so now you simply do what you did last season and let the laterals hang down towards you and watch them flower.
Good pruning means that very spring you keep taking the laterals back to the main branches to within about 20cm 8 inches of the branch. This way it stays vertical rather than sprawling all over the place and encourages more flowers and fruit. Also choose a self-pollinating variety if you only have space to grow one vine.
Mix it up and that will be fantastic. This plant - look at that. That's where that passionfruit has been grafted onto the rootstock. Now never bury that point because you don't want anything like suckers coming up from beneath that graft. If you remember that, you'll get a really successful growth rate. Plant the passionfruit at the original depth it was in the pot, backfill, press it down and I will get around to watering that.
The next very important job over the coming seasons is to train it correctly and very few people do that. What you should do is let one main stem become a really thick branch, like this one and let it grow right to the top and cut off any of the side shoots that go out until it reaches that top and then you can let the side shoots go and attach them to the trellis or the fence or the wire and you'll have a really good framework for your passionfruit to fruit well on.
Water the plant in really well at this stage and over summer, give it a lot more water. It really needs it. And the other thing - give it some complete fertiliser - one that's not too high in nitrogen, otherwise you do end up with too many leaves and not enough flowers. And if you do follow all that advice, you'll have a very productive passionfruit. For some reason old seed takes a lot longer to germinate. So buy some nice passionfruit, separate half a dozen seeds from the pulp, and plant them as soon as possible.
They take about ten to twenty days to germinate. If you buy your seed then it's likely older, so be prepared to wait. Old passionfruit seeds can take months to germinate. The best way seems to be to just put them in the garden and leave them be, and eventually they come up. Or not. There are some tricks like soaking the seeds in warm water first, and some people swear by vinegar.
Others report their acidic soil seems to do the job. I believe in fresh seed. Whenever I used fresh seed it came up without problems. Seeds of hybrid varieties do not grow true to type. If you live in a cooler climate the passionfruit you buy may be a hybrid variety.
If you grow that seed you don't know what kind of fruit you will get. It will be nothing like the parent plant and probably not very nice. Find out what the fruit is that you buy, or buy the seed so you know what you are planting, or even buy a plant from a nursery.
Another reason for not growing passionfruit from seed is the high susceptibility of the purple varieties and the hybrids to the root disease Fusarium wilt. Luckily, resistant root stocks exist flavicarpa varieties. If Fusarium wilt is a problem in your soil, and if you need to grow susceptible varieties because of your cool climate, then you may want to invest in a grafted plant from a nursery. Ah, it's nice to live in the true tropics.
All tropical passionfruits are reasonably resistant to Fusarium wilt and they are also more resistant to nematodes, another problem when growing passionfruit. You can plant out your seedlings when they are about eight inches high 20 cm. If you wait too long and they are much bigger than that, prune them back as you plant them out. It helps reduce moisture loss while the root system settles in.
Make sure that whatever support you have in mind is strong enough for the vine. They do get huge and heavy pretty quickly and need something sturdy. Also be aware that a vigorously growing passionfruit will climb over any- and everything it can reach and can quickly smother plants.
Make your own life easier by growing passionfruit away from other shrubs and trees. Be careful to disturb the roots as little as possible. Dig a big enough hole, at least twice as big as the root ball, and ideally mix the soil with compost before you back fill. Then mulch thickly around the plant. But it will quickly get the message. As soon as there is something for the little tendrils to grab hold of, say the first wire on your trellis, it will climb on its own.
Of course, as always, don't overdo it. Overwatering can lead to root problems. Make sure you don't have water puddling or not draining away. Overfeeding can also lead to problems. Too much nitrogen most commercial fertilisers are heavy on nitrogen will lead to lots of soft green leaves, attractive to all sorts of insects and diseases, but you get little fruit. So, lots of compost, lots of mulch, and the odd sprinkle of a balanced, organic, slow release fertiliser. Now here is an issue that I only became aware of when readers started asking me about it.
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