I see that my small tree does show signs of Cedar-Quince Rust on a few of the fruits so this plant is not as disease free as sometimes claimed. The forest around my property has a few Eastern Red Cedar or juniper trees and the list of fruiting plants that suffer from one of the many forms of Rust disease keeps growing. I've seen Cedar-Apple Rust, Cedar-Quince Rust and Cedar-Hawthorn Rust so far and it affects pears, serviceberries and now medlar. Some plants only show a little damage but others are killed by it.

I think they take a couple of months to ripen. I seem to remember September being the month I normally start eating them. Because my vines are growing all over the garden (which is full of long rows of various fruiting bushes) I don't always stay on top of the passion fruits. I usually see them lying on the ground when I mow the grass strips running between the rows. I did notice a few thumb tip sized fruits forming this weekend.

I also think that they only seem to make fruit after the summer equinox. I think the fruits forming now take a while to ripen but the fruits formed later seem to ripen quicker so that everybody gets ripe by first frost in late October/early November.

I have most of Lee Reich's books - I'll have to look for that chapter.

At this point of the summer I have fruit on three types of passionvines in my garden. The P. edulis (purple fruit, grown from seed) has a couple of fruit, one of which has ripened and had a nice rich flavor. The P. incarnata that I mentioned earlier is in full bloom and I see fruits forming. And surprise surprise a small potted 'Lady Margaret' hybrid (Passiflora incarnata crossed with Passiflora coccinea) has one small fruit on it. All are supposed to be edible so I will taste and see how they are.

After reading your comments on container growing versus in the ground - I think I am going to set up an area in the garden to sink large pots for my wild collected P. incarnata's. I need a way to make harvesting the fruit easier so some sort of trellis with the plants in large sunken pots should work. Out of all of them that I grow these guys have the best flavor.

I got an 'Orinoco' to fruit but I had to dig it up one very cold winter and keep it in a pot that I moved in and out for a few years. After harvesting the fruit (two clusters from two different stems) I cut the tree back and buried it in mulch and leaves for the winter. We got very cold last winter and it did not survive.

I want to try the smaller trees with smaller bananas that ripen quicker - like Viente Cohol. My plan is to grow them for a couple of years in pots, shelter them in the greenhouse for the winter and then plant them outdoors in the spring when they are large enough to fruit and hopefully get ripe fruit before first frost in the fall.

Our local university is working on breeding a seedless Musa veluntina which is hardy here in zone 7b. The bananas are small and waxy but supposedly edible.

I haven't seen that hybrid available here in the US. I have Shippova (Sorbus x Pyrus), Ivan's Beauty and Ivan's Belle - I believe one is a Sorbus crossed with a Hawthorn and the other is a Sorbus crossed with Aronia. They are just now reaching fruiting size and they are also just now showing signs are Cedar Hawthorn Rust or Cedar Quince Rust.

I would love to say that my two Rat Terriers help out with the varmit control but they are lazy bums and prefer to sleep at night, in my bed, under the blankets! rather than patrol the garden. So far opossums and raccoons have not been a big problem. All I ever see are young ones and everyone seems to prefer the compost pile rather than the fruit. I'm sure that will change as more of the collection gets to fruiting age. In general I have a "show no mercy" policy about any animals coming into my garden or chicken house. I live on the edge of the city and had more wildlife bothering my garden when I lived downtown. My neighborhood doesn't have trash pickup so everyone hauls their trash to a station at the end of the street and I think that it is the lack of human trash that keeps the wildlife numbers low. Deer are another problem but I installed an 8 foot welded wire fence around the entire 1.5 acres and they don't even try to get in anymore.

I haven't checked out their website to see what the species are that you ordered but I don't think they are P. incarnata nor are they winter hardy.

I grow both P. edulis and P. incarnata in my garden (zone 7b Raleigh NC).  Edulis are the purple fruited type and they are kept in pots and moved into the greenhouse for the winter. After 3 years they are finally large enough to fruit which they have this spring for the first time ever. The incarnatas were originally planted in one spot but they now have taken over the yard and pop up in just about every environment. I only weed them out of flowerbeds where they will pose a problem because I like having them around.

There are wild incarnatas (Maypops) in the woods around the house but I have never found fruit on them. The one I grow came from seed I collected in the wild in Arkansas at a highway rest area. I noticed the vines were short (maybe 6 feet) and had been covered with fruit (maybe a dozen on each vine). The ones growing in my garden are still somewhat short for a passionvine and produce more than enough fruit for me to eat. The fruit only has that intense tropical flavor if it is dead ripe and falls off the plant. The seeds have to be black and the outside wrinkly otherwise it has no flavor.

Even when people visit from South America and they are touring my garden, they agree that the fruit of these vines taste very similar to the purple fruited ones back home.

I love these plants but most folks think the fruit looks too much like frog's eggs to eat it. Those that I can convince to taste it love it also.

I'm not sure how long it will take the purple ones to ripen but I am definitely moving them up to larger pots in hopes that it will mean more fruit.

Earlier this year I found one of those dwarf mulberries (Morus nigra) at a local garden center. I had ordered some from a catalog which haven't been delivered yet but I still purchased one just to see how well they grow and what they taste like. I didn't really believe the claims of how much they fruit but here it is in April and its loaded with fruit. They aren't the best mulberries I've ever tasted but they aren't bad either. Glad I have some more in the mail. I plan on planting some of them in the ground for summer fruit and keeping some in pots that get sheltered in the greenhouse for the winter so I get a longer fruiting season.

So here is one of my purple passion fruit vines blooming and fruiting. It was grown from grocery store seeds (2 or 3 years ago). I thought these guys needed cross pollination. The only other passion vine I have near it is a hybrid grown for its flowers not its fruit - P. incarnata crossed with P. coccinea. They both spent the winter in the greenhouse. So my question is - can P. edulis pollinate itself? or does it need an unrelated pollinator?

Some of you may recall that last year I had one branch of one of my Asimina triloba trees flower late in the summer. All four of my trees had flowered and fruited like normal but this one also had one branch flower again in August (and the flowers were on top of the branch and facing upward, which is odd). At the same time my Cherimoya tree was flowering in the greenhouse. I attempted to hand pollinate flowers on both trees. I had been told that Pawpaw needed an unrelated cross in order to fruit and since no other pawpaws were flowering at that time I assumed any fruit produced would be a result of the Cherimoya pollen. I had hoped that the Cherimoya would make fruit since it is indoors and protected from cold, thinking that a hybrid between them would not be winter hardy. Well the pawpaw did set fruit and I sowed the seeds and kept them isolated from any pawpaw seeds that I also sowed. Of the 6 seeds only two sprouted and one of them died almost immediately after sprouting. The lone survivor is doing well but growing slow (which is normal at this stage). I had hoped that the non-crossed pawpaw seeds would also sprout so that I could evaluate their leaves to determine if I indeed have a cross but so far none of them have emerged. I've been told that because their chromosome count is different that they more than likely did not cross and that this plant is a solid pawpaw. I've also been told that the local university can't do any sort of analysis on the tissues to determine if it is a cross. So the only thing I can do at this point is watch it grow and hope it appears different than a solid pawpaw.

The yard took a big hit - lots of flowers got frozen and some newly sprouted leaves got damaged beyond repair. The pawpaws seem to have only lost about a quarter of their flowers so they should be fine since they were blooming so heavily. I really won't know for another month when the fruit starts to develop. Kiwis were damaged severely but should snap out of it but I doubt they will make new flower buds. Plums, Peaches and Apricots seem to have lost most of their flowers but not all of them. Pears appeared fine but upon closer inspection the flowers were damaged. I'm not sure what this means future fruit-wise. Some of these trees were just getting to fruiting size, this would have been their first fruiting summer. One of my hardy citrus hybrids bit the dust. Because it had been so warm for the weeks leading up to this past weekend a lot of plants were starting to bloom or push out leaves. Most of the fruiting plants in the garden can take cold weather so the plants will survive but this years crop will be low or gone completely. Now that it has warmed up, it's time to start fighting Fire Blight and Cedar Quince Rust.

I stopped by this morning and all of their trees look fine. One is covered in dead leaves but the stems are still green all the way to the top of the tree. The other two are covered with green stems and leaves but it looks like there are fewer leaves than during the summer. I will take some photos when spring really happens (we are supposed to dip down into the mid 20's tonight). At home I have one Poncirus trifoliata in the ground that is unscathed by winter, it is now in full bloom; two hybrids one of which is older and larger and it now looks dead, the other looks fine but slightly damaged by the past two winters. They are sheltered by my garage so they don't get any of the cold winter wind.

I grew up in the center of the country where the soil and water was more alkaline and people struggled to keep blueberries alive. Then I moved to the east coast, bought a house with a large yard and went to town planting things. I have put in many many blueberries and the first two years after planting included hard summer droughts and I lost most of the plants each summer due to water stress. I dug them up and re-worked the soil in that row in the garden and installed a drip irrigation line. I did everything you can think of to help acidify the soil and then replanted with new bushes. Ever since then I have had to boost the acidity of the soil throughout the year. I use a lot of pine bark fines (small chips sold as "soil conditioner"), pine needles and I water with dilute vinegar/water solution once each quarter, AND I treat the soil with any number of over the counter soil acidifiers. Now my blueberries do fine and I get a bumper crop. If I wait too long to treat them they sulk and start to go downhill. The odd thing is, less than 300 feet away there are wild blueberries growing in the woods. No one babies them and they do just fine.