Gadenin日本語Get the appIt flowers on new wood, which changes everything
Feijoa produces its flowers on shoots grown in the current season, on wood that pushed out in spring. That is the opposite of a tip-bearing fruit tree and it makes the shrub unusually tolerant of the knife: you can take it back hard, even to a stump, and it will regrow and eventually fruit again. It is why feijoa works as a clipped fruiting hedge, which very few fruiting plants do.
The consequence for timing is straightforward. Prune after the harvest has finished, when the new growth that follows has the whole of the coming spring and summer to mature and set flower buds. Prune in spring, just as the shrub is pushing the shoots that would have carried this year's flowers, and you cut the crop off.
The other consequence is that a light annual prune costs you almost nothing and gains you a great deal, because the fruit that ripens well is the fruit that sees light. A neglected feijoa becomes a dense evergreen shell with all the fruit around the outside and a dark, dead, twiggy middle.
| When you cut | Effect on the crop | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Straight after harvest | None; regrowth carries next year's flowers | The right time |
| Mid-winter in a mild climate | Slight delay to spring growth | Acceptable |
| Spring, as new shoots push | Removes the shoots that would flower | Avoid |
| During flowering | Removes open flowers and set fruit | Never |
| Light thinning of crowded wood any time | Negligible | Fine |
| Hard renovation to a framework | No crop for one to two years | Only on a neglected plant |
Shaping a young plant
Feijoa left entirely alone grows as a multi-stemmed shrub with branches sweeping to the ground. That is a perfectly good shape for a windbreak, but for fruit it has one serious drawback: the fruit falls, and low sweeping branches with foliage touching the soil make the drop zone impossible to search. Most growers lift the skirt of the plant for exactly that reason.
Decide early whether you want a shrub or a small tree. As a shrub, keep three to five main stems from the base and remove the rest. As a tree, select a single leader in the first two years and remove the lower branches gradually until you have a clear stem of two to three feet (60-90 cm). Either works; a clear base is what matters.
- First two years: build the frame, take nothing else Choose the main stems you want and remove competing shoots at the base. Leave the rest of the growth alone. The plant needs leaf area to establish, and there is no crop to protect yet.
- Lift the skirt Remove low branches until the lowest foliage sits at least a foot (30 cm) above the ground. This keeps fruit visible and reachable when it drops, keeps the base dry, and makes mulching and weeding possible.
- Open the center once a year Immediately after harvest, take out crossing branches, anything growing inward, and dead twiggy wood in the middle. Remove whole branches at their origin rather than trimming many tips.
- Cap the height where you can reach Reduce the tallest stems back to a lower side branch to keep the plant at six to eight feet (1.8-2.4 m). Since it flowers on new wood, height reduction after harvest costs nothing and makes hand pollination and net-laying possible.
- Remove suckers and any growth below a graft Pull off basal suckers while soft. If your plant is grafted, anything appearing below the union is rootstock and must go, or it will take over.
Hedges, containers and renovation
As a hedge, feijoa is clipped after harvest and then left alone for the year. Shearing a feijoa hedge in spring or summer, as you would a plain evergreen, keeps it neat and gives you no fruit at all, because every flowering shoot is cut away as it forms. If you want both fruit and neatness, accept one loose informal trim a year immediately after the last fruit drops.
In a container, prune to keep the top in proportion to the root volume, again after harvest. Root-prune and repot every two to three years into fresh mix, taking an inch or two (3-5 cm) off the outside of the root ball. A pot-bound feijoa flowers but drops its fruit, because it cannot hold water through the swelling period.
A badly neglected plant can be renovated hard. Feijoa regrows from old wood readily, so you can take it down to a framework of stubs two to three feet (60-90 cm) high and it will shoot again. Expect no crop for one and possibly two seasons. A gentler route, and the one to prefer where the plant is still cropping, is to take out a quarter of the oldest stems each year after harvest over four years, letting new growth replace them progressively.
If you renovate hard, thin the mass of new shoots that follows once they are a few inches long, keeping the best-placed ones. Left alone they grow into the same congested thicket you just cut out.
Cuts, tools and what to record
Feijoa wood is dense and springy, so use sharp bypass pruners for anything up to half an inch (1 cm) and a pruning saw above that; anvil pruners crush the stem and leave a wound that dies back. Cut just above an outward-facing bud or back to a branch junction, and take large branches in stages so the weight does not tear the bark down the stem.
Wound paint is unnecessary. Clean cuts on a healthy plant seal themselves. Do clean the blade with alcohol between plants if you are working through a hedge in which one plant looks sick.
Note the date you pruned, roughly how much you took and, the following autumn, whether the crop rose or fell. Feijoa responds visibly to pruning timing within a single season, so a two-line record for two or three years will settle for your own garden exactly how hard and how late you can cut without paying for it.