A Step-By-Step Illustrated Guide
If you are a gardener or a foodie that loves exotic flavors, and you live in a mild climate (ideally in USDA zones 10-12 or equivalent), then you need a passionfruit vine in your garden! These beautiful and vigorous vines produce out-of-this-world flowers and later, delicious, flavorful fruits that are perfect for cooking, baking and cocktails!
In this post, I illustrate how to hand-pollinate your passionfruit flowers. This may be necessary if there are not enough pollinators (specifically bees) around to accomplish the task. I’ve also found that, if you don’t have multiple passionfruit vines and loads of flowers blooming at the same time, the bees just don’t notice or don’t consider it worth the effort.
Why hand-pollinate Your Passionfruit?
Hand-pollinating is particularly necessary if you are living in an apartment in the city. Fortunately, a passionfruit vines are container-compatible (I would recommend at least 10 gallons) as long as you have a sunny balcony or rooftop. Just make sure your balcony or growing area can accommodate the 3-5 foot width and possibly 10 feet in height. You can prune the vines to keep it at a manageable size if necessary. I would recommend a trellis as well, which can help turn your plant into a living privacy screen.
Do your research!
Before we delve into this pollination guide, first of all, if you want passionfruit, you have to make sure that you are growing a species that actually produces them. The most commonly seen in cultivation (at least in the United States) is Passiflora edulis v. edulis, which produces purple-skinned fruit. There are many varieties derived from this particular species and all of them produce edible fruits. But don’t walk into your local nursery or big box store and expect that any Passiflora species will produce fruit for you. Be sure to do your research or ask for help!
Hand-pollination procedure
Passionfruit flowers bloom sequentially as the vines grow, usually from early spring to mid-summer. By mid-summer, as many of the earlier fruits are developing, the later blooming flowers get noticeably smaller before stopping completely. The following photos illustrate the steps I take to pollinate passionfruit flowers.
In order to initiate fruit development, pollen from the anthers needs to be transferred to the stigmas. Passionfruit flowers have three stigmas and five anthers, which you can see on the cover photo for this blog post.
The purple-skinned Passiflora edulis can self-pollinate, so you don’t need a second plant to cross-pollinate with. There is a yellow-skinned passionfruit, Passiflora edulis v. flavicarpa, that cannot self-pollinate, so I would not recommend growing that particular species just for the sake of convenience.
Passionfruit flowers only bloom for one day. If they are not pollinated by the end of the day, the fruits do not develop and the shriveled flower eventually falls off the vine. During the blooming period, I try to check every day to see if there are any new flowers that I need to pollinate. If there are new blooms, I start off by detaching an anther. As you can see in the previous photo, the underside is loaded with grainy yellow pollen.
Using your fingers or a pair of tweezers, rub the anther onto the surface of the downward-facing stigmas. The pollen is very sticky and adheres quite well to the stigma’s surface.
Make sure that pollen covers each of the three stigmas. You will likely need to pull off more anthers in order to pollinate all of the passionfruit stigmas. If you look down in the following photo, you will notice that I’ve removed all but one anther.
Congrats! You just pollinated your first passionfruit flower! Yes, it’s really that easy! The more practice you get, the faster the process becomes.
Now it’s just a waiting game.
About 2-3 days after I pollinate the passionfruit flowers, they fully shrivel and die back. While it may be tempting to dig into the shriveled flowers to check for a viable fruit, I never touch them until at least a week has passed. After taking the time to pollinate the flowers by hand, the last thing I want to do is to break off a baby fruit with clumsy fingers. After about a week, I am OK with taking a peek, as the growing fruit will be quite obvious.
The fruits spend a good deal of time on the vine in their speckled green state. Continue to care for the vine as usual, and make sure that it remains properly watered. If you notice some of the green fruits starting to wrinkle a little bit, check the moisture level in the soil. Chances are your mother plant is dehydrated. A good, deep watering should fix the issue and your fruits will plump right back up again. Although it’s convenient for the plant to tell you when it needs to be watered, I would recommend against relying on this tactic. Recurring drought stress saps the energy of your plant, and it may decide to sacrifice some fruits to compensate.
I have noticed that the earliest blooming flowers tend to yield the bigger, heavier fruits. By mid-summer, as the bloom period ends and the flowers start to get smaller, so do the fruits. This is perfectly normal, so don’t be concerned if you notice your fruits are starting to shrink.
At about the 2 to 2.5 month mark, the passionfruits start to transition from green to purple. They remain on the vine for another 2 to 3 weeks before they detach and fall to the ground. I always wait for the fruits to fall off on their own and never pick them off from the plant myself. Fortunately, because of their tough outer rind, the fruits are quite resistant to pests, bruising and rot. But don’t use that as an excuse to leave your passionfruits languishing on the ground for days! During the ripening period, I check my vine every day for fallen fruits.
I store harvested passionfruits in a basket at room temperature and wait for them to soften and wrinkle all around before eating them or cooking with them. Waiting for them to wrinkle gives the fruit more time to concentrate its sugars and deepen its flavor.
And there you have it— the complete tutorial on how to manually pollinate your passionfruit vine! Passionfruits are so versatile in cooking and baking and there are hundreds of unique recipes online that you can experiment with. From food to desserts to alcoholic drinks— the sky is the limit!
Always Keep Growing,
Heather (a.k.a. The Botanical Chick)
