Sunday, June 26, 2016

Lilikoi In Bloom Right Now

This morning I stepped out the front door into beautiful sunshine, a rare occurrence lately in this very wet month of June. Taking the time to enjoy the view, I looked up a spied a beautiful flower on the passion fruit vine (called lilikoi here). Whoa, the vine must have been flowering for the past week or more and I didn't notice. There's even tiny infant fruits away up high in the vine. Fantastic. 


I've never noticed how long it takes the fruits to mature from the time the vine flowers, so this time I'm making a note of it. I'm curious to see just how long it takes. Does anyone know or have a guess? 

I am noticing that most of the flowers aren't resulting in fruits. Is that normal? I don't know because I never closely monitored the lilikoi vines before. But since most of the flowers are not setting fruit, I'm assuming that they are insect pollinated. I've never noticed birds or bats visiting the blooms. 

Well, looks like I'm no expert when it comes to lilikoi. I do know that it loves to climb trees. It's easy to grow at my location. That it produces fruits seasonally. And that I love the flavor. 

1 comment:

  1. "S" emailed.......
    I got to noodling around in Passiflora on Uncle Wiki just lately. There must be twenty-five species and they are all different, to a degree. The wonderful flowers on our type aren't even the wildest! The leaves of one species are herbally prescribed for anxiety but it doesn't compute across the genus; some are just loaded with cyanide. That should settle your problems, all right!

    If my wobbling memory can be trusted, doesn't fruit fall occur in autumn?

    The purple ones are supposed to be less astringent..... I've never seen one tho I've heard about them for decades... And Uncle sez you can eat the Banana Poka....

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