Gadenin日本語Get the appA shrub covered in flowers and carrying nothing
This is the complaint that brings most people to read about feijoa. The shrub is healthy, it flowers freely, the petals fall, and then almost every flower drops off at the base leaving nothing behind. The plant is not sick and it is not too young if it has been flowering for two or three seasons. It has not been pollinated.
Two things cause it. The first is that a great many feijoas are partly or wholly self-incompatible, meaning their own pollen will not set their own fruit, or sets only a light crop of small fruit. The second is that the natural pollinator is a bird, not a bee, and outside its native range the local birds often take no interest.
Both problems have the same two answers, and you can use either or both: plant a second, genetically different feijoa within about fifteen feet (4.5 m), or move the pollen yourself. A single plant with hand pollination will crop. A single plant with neither will often carry a handful of fruit at most.
Why birds, and what it means for your garden
The feijoa flower is built around a bird. The petals are thick, white outside and deep pink-red within, and they are sweet and fleshy: a bird lands, eats the petals, and in doing so brushes the crimson stamens and carries pollen to the next flower. The nectar-and-petal reward is aimed at birds rather than at bees, and the pollen is heavy and sticky, so wind moves almost none of it.
Where the local birds have learned the trick, feijoa sets heavily with no help at all. Where they have not, the flowers are visited by a few bees for pollen only, and pollen transfer between plants is poor. You can tell which situation you are in by watching for ten minutes on a warm morning during full bloom: if birds are working the flowers and the petals are being stripped, pollination is happening and your problem lies elsewhere.
This is also why still, sheltered weather at bloom does not save you the way it would with a wind-pollinated crop, and why heavy rain during the flowering fortnight can wash out a whole season. If bloom coincides with a wet spell, hand pollination between showers is worth the effort.
| Symptom | Likely cause | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Flowers drop whole, nothing swells | No pollen transfer at all | Add a second plant; hand pollinate this season |
| A few small lopsided fruit only | Partial self-pollination | Cross-pollinate by hand from another plant |
| Petals eaten, good set | Birds are working it | Nothing; this is what you want |
| Heavy set that drops at marble size | Water stress or heavy nitrogen, not pollination | Deep soak weekly; stop feeding |
| No flowers at all | Too young, too shaded, or pruned at the wrong time | Check light and pruning timing, not pollination |
| Good set only on one side | Pollinator plant is on that side | Move pollen by hand to the far side |
Hand pollination, step by step
Hand pollination on feijoa is easy, quick and reliable, and it is the single highest-return job in the feijoa year. It works because the flowers are large and open, the anthers are obvious, and the pollen is visible as a dusty crimson-and-cream bloom on the stamens. The best material is pollen from a different plant; the same plant's own pollen is worth trying if you have only one, and on some plants it gives a partial crop.
Work in the middle of a warm dry morning, once the dew has gone and the anthers have opened. Cool wet mornings give you damp, clumped pollen that will not transfer.
- Pick your flowers Choose freshly opened flowers where the petals are still firm and the stamens stand upright with visible pollen. A flower that has been open for days, with limp browning petals, is past use.
- Collect pollen on a soft brush Twirl a small soft artist's brush, a cotton bud or the tip of your finger among the stamens of a flower on the donor plant until it carries a dusting of pollen. A whole flower snapped off and used as the brush works just as well.
- Find the stigma and touch it The stigma is on the single style that stands taller than the ring of stamens, tipped with a small sticky knob. Dab pollen directly onto that tip. That contact is the whole job.
- Do twenty or thirty flowers, not two Not every pollinated flower holds. Work along a branch doing every open flower you can reach, and repeat every two or three days through the two to three weeks of bloom as new flowers open.
- Mark what you did Tie a loop of wool on the branches you pollinated. At the end of the season you will be able to see exactly how much difference it made, which tells you whether you need a second plant or already have enough natural pollination.
If you have two plants, carry pollen in both directions on the same walk. Cross-pollination usually gives not just more fruit but noticeably larger fruit than a plant setting on its own pollen.
Eat the petals, keep the fruit
The petals are one of the best things about the plant and almost nobody knows it. They are thick, white flushed with deep pink inside, and they taste sweet and faintly of marshmallow and cinnamon. They can be eaten straight off the shrub, scattered on a salad, or floated in a drink, and they are at their best on the day the flower opens.
The important point is that taking the petals does not cost you the fruit. The ovary sits below the petals and the stamens are left behind, so if you pull the petals away carefully with your fingers and leave the crimson stamens and the central style untouched, the flower can still be pollinated and still sets fruit. Birds do exactly this in the plant's homeland; you are simply doing it more tidily.
Take petals from flowers you have just hand-pollinated and you get both. Take them from a plant that is setting more than you want and you thin the crop and get a treat at the same time. The only rule is not to tear the flower apart at the base, which removes the ovary and ends the matter.
Getting more set next year
If a season goes badly, work through the causes in order rather than assuming pollination. Feed and water are the usual confounders: a plant given plenty of nitrogen makes leaves and few flowers, and a plant that dries out sheds set fruit at marble size, which looks like pollination failure but is not. Deep weekly watering from flowering until the fruit is full size fixes more feijoa problems than anything else.
If flowers are genuinely dropping unfertilised, order a second plant of different parentage and site it within fifteen feet (4.5 m). Two seedlings from different sources will cross-pollinate; two plants propagated from the same parent may not, because they are genetically identical.
Keep a simple record through bloom: the date the first flower opened, the date the last one dropped, whether you saw birds working the flowers, how many flowers you pollinated by hand, and roughly how many fruit you gathered from the marked branches. Three seasons of that will tell you exactly how much natural pollination your garden provides, and whether the brush is a permanent part of your year or something you can stop doing.