Liliquoii help

[pslamont]

After several year of careful gardening followed by two years of total neglect, my Liliquoi have decided to produce a bunch of fruit., Cool, huh? Unfortunately they are all hollow inside! What's with that? No seeds, no beautiful orange stuff, nothing. Green to yellowing outside skin, lined with a white 1/8 inch layer and then AIR.

Any ideas?

I want to be the kind of woman that, when my feet
hit the floor each morning, the devil says

"Oh Crap, She's up!"

[Royall]

Diet Lilikoi?? 8^)

Royall

[Tolleys]

You might have a pollination problem...

"Pollination Requirements:

The flowers of passionfruit are self-sterile, and some plants are even self-incompatible (Akamine and Girolami 1957). Care must be taken, therefore, in the selection and distribution of compatible clones or cultivars in the field to insure maximum fruit production (Gilmartin 1958). The amount of pollen deposited on the stigma determines the number of seeds set and size of the fruit. The ovule must be pollinated and the seeds developed if juice is to form in the aril (pulp sac) (Knight and Winters 1962, 1963). A fruit can develop as many as 350 seeds. Unless about 100 ovules develop into seeds, the fruit is likely to be "hollow" (light in weight and with little juice). Few fruit develop with fewer than 50 seeds. There is no parthenocarpic set of fruit.

Akamine and Girolami (1959) found that fruit set, numbers of seed, fruit weight, and juice yield correlated with numbers of pollen grains deposited upon the stigma. They concluded that the maximum effect of pollination was not attained with their largest number (1,776) of pollen grains deposited on a stigma. This shows the importance of adequate bee visitation and pollen transfer between flowers within the brief span of time of stigma receptivity for maximum set of fruit."

Here is the whitepaper I found. I stopped searching after I found this. So have not verified with other sources.
http://beeculture.com/content/pollinatio...fruit.html


Susan

[Carey]

Also wait... Bill M (remember him???) taught us to only pick the fruit when the skin is very yellow & wrinkle-y (even wait till it falls is OK)

[pslamont]

Umm, sounding like a pollination problem. We have so few bees. A friend once put a bee hive in the area but has since removed it. Anyone else a beeper that would like a place to put a hive???

I want to be the kind of woman that, when my feet
hit the floor each morning, the devil says

"Oh Crap, She's up!"

[Liz]

Aren't liliko'i pollinated mostly by the carpenter bees? Both honeybees & carpenter bees are all over our vine. The little honeybees love it but they aren't big enough to actually do the pollinating. Commercial liliko'i growers often leave big logs lying about to give the carpenter bees somewhere to chew & nest, then they'll come around to pollinate your vines, too. We have a standing dead tree nearby that's full of carpenter bees who make a beeline (sorry!) for the liliko'i - and we're getting juicy fruit so it must be working. :-)

aloha, Liz

"The best things in life aren't things."

[pslamont]

good idea Liz.... will have to work on that. Do they like ohia, waiwi or hap'u log the best?

I want to be the kind of woman that, when my feet
hit the floor each morning, the devil says

"Oh Crap, She's up!"

[Liz]

hmm.. no idea, sorry. But I'd think whatever's big enough, they'd go for.
'Ours' is one of those "heart leaf" trees - don't know what it's really called, that's just our descriptive family name for it, lol.

aloha, Liz

"The best things in life aren't things."

[Kapohocat]

quote:

---

Originally posted by pslamont

good idea Liz.... will have to work on that. Do they like ohia, waiwi or hap'u log the best?...

---

We had bamboo as our tomato stakes and the carpenter bees loved boring in those!

[Chuysmom]

We also have tons of carpenter bees (and the little honeybees as Liz described). No empty fruits here...that is strange though. Never heard of that one. Wouldn't it just not grow a fruit at all? Please post the results of your carpenter bee village...'enquiring minds' and all that.

Carrie

http://www.sapphiresoap.etsy.com

"Even the smallest person can change the course of the future..." Galadriel LOTR