Wanted to update my passion fruit rollercoaster. Let’s recap:
April 2018 – Bought some vines off Amazon. They grew throughout summer. Gave me 8 unripped fruit before the winter came and wiped them out by January 2019.
Summer 2019 – Luckily I had grabbed a few clippings before the plant died and planted them in the summer. I don’t think it gave me any fruit that summer. However, in the fall, I decided to move it inside for the winter and added a grow light. It flourished for a while with the grow light, but then it eventually died too.
August 2020 – Was browsing FB marketplace and found a nursery selling passion fruit vines for $25. I went and bought 2. They already had fruit on them, but it was too late in the season for them to ripen and eat. I planted them in some 15 gallon fabric baskets I bought on Amazon. Winter time came and wiped out the vines.
Summer 2021 – I thought the vines had died, but they grew back. It was a pretty hot summer and I think it produced about 5 unripe fruit. Surely, winter came and wiped it out AGAIN.
Summer 2022 – Sure enough, it’s summer time again and the vines are BACK! This time, with even more vines! We had a pretty cold summer up until July so I don’t think we have enough time for any fruit to ripen this year. I’m not quite sure what to do – whether to bring it in during winter and set up a grow light again or maybe make a makeshift greenhouse on the patio or maybe plant it into the ground. I do have 2 of them in the baskets; if you have any suggestions, let me know.
I’ve grown both the purple and yellow varieties with success in the SF Bay area. For colder winters like Seattle they will go dormant down to the stem. Best bet is to let the pot dry out, then bring it inside, store in the garage, outside of frost. Put it back out in Spring and let it do its thing. A good citrus fertilizer can help a lot. They do not like to dry out in the growing season and plants in pots can do that faster than most realize.
They do need something to climb and do best if they can do it in more than one dimension (i.e. they can grow along a wall but do way better if you have an arbor so they can grown in more directions.) If you get the green density thick enough they can even over winter!
I’m not a passion fruit expert by any means but I’ve had success with my plant in the last few years. Here’s a picture of my backyard. On the left side of the picture, the plant that’s growing along the top half of the wall (on wires) is a passion fruit clipping that I planted about 4-5 months ago (it has already produced about 30 fruits). On the right side of picture, the passion fruit has been planted for 4 years. It is hard to see but there are hundreds of fruits (green in the picture).
https://photos.app.goo.gl/8kFEyjhYFvnSXfiZ7
Here are my thoughts:
1. Passion fruit thrives in warm weather… I’m in Southern California and it seems to grow like weed…. But it doesn’t do well in extreme heat (recent days)
2. You need something for them to climb… and they will continue to grow, so wide space is necessary.
3. Flowers only come out for one day. If you miss it, that’s it.
4. You need to hand pollinate the flowers to have high fruit success rate. Can bees do it? Yes… but not nearly as good as me doing it.
5. Tincture of time. Passion fruit actually grows extremely quickly within 2 days, to full size. But it remains on the vine for a couple months before it matures and becomes tasty.
6. It literally grows like weed and wild. It’s very hard to keep it neat because the vine grows 360 degrees and in between other vines. My experience is that once a vine fruits, it will never fruit from the same location. So you’ll need a lot of space for it to keep going; or you can hard trim it after fruits.
Looks like your planter is on a balcony. The passion fruit may have a hard time growing because it likes to sprawl (my passion fruit at least). You’ll need trellis of some sort to help it.