Fruit - Hipster Homesteaders

How We Saved a Dying Passionfruit Vine – Container Gardening

I always knew that it'd be a bit of a risk trying to grow a passionfruit vine in a container, but due to our location in the north this tropical plant simply would not have done well in the ground during winter.

The vine was growing quite fine for many months until it started losing leaves at the bottom. The problem got worse and worse and we knew we had to figure out a solution right away. The problem was that any solution we read about could also have been the problem!

So, after testing, we came to a conclusion- we were underwatering. Read more about how we figured this out below.

Note: Please keep in mind that my passionfruit vine is potted and trellised. I bring it inside in the winter as we live in Zone 6b with cold enough winters that would kill the plant. This more than likely influenced the issue that will be described below and may not have the same solution for those growing a plant in the ground.

Although we live in Zone 6b, I knew I always wanted tropical plants that we take in and out of the house seasonally.

For things like fruit trees, this is pretty simple. Plant a dwarf citrus tree in a large enough pot, take it out when the risk of freeze passes, give it a ton of natural light when indoors, and you're (probably) good to go. But what about vines? Many of our favorite tropical fruits, like passion fruit, do not grow on trees but on sprawling vines.

As a passion fruit vine was high on my list of must-haves, we simply found ourselves with an issue of figuring out how to make the sprawling vine work outside of its ideal Zone 9-11. As you may expect, moving a 40+ foot vine in and out as seasons change sounded like a challenge.

Although one answer was simply to acquire native Maypops for planting outside (these are North American passion flowers with cold tolerance down to approximately Zones 6-7 pending varietal), which we also did, I still wanted to have a proper passion fruit all the same.

So in this one, I wanted to share a bit more about how we planted our vine and, more importantly, share a passion fruit trellis idea that really allowed us to maximize our surface area while still being in a container!

When we first purchased citrus trees (such as our key lime, Meyer lemon, and others), one of the first questions we got from other gardeners was simply “you're going to keep them inside?”.

In living in western Pennsylvania, the answer was, of course- it will have to be indoors for half of the year.

The second question that then immediately would follow is “how will the flowers get pollinated?” to which I would reply “by me!” (by hand). After often surprising looks all around I would go on to say that hand-pollinating citrus trees is rather easy because, in all honesty, it is!

So in this one, I thought I would share the simple steps on how to pollinate lemon trees and other citrus trees you may have at home!

When I said that I wanted to convert our weed-covered hillside into a fruit patch full of berry bushes, fruit trees, and more, Angie had one rule for me starting out- “don't spend money”.

This was partly because she (rightly) knew that our weeds are absurdly challenging (I'm still working on that one) but also because buying fruit trees and bushes can be very, very expensive. So since we were at extreme risks of failure for any endeavor on our hillside, it was logical to try and approach things for free.

So over the last two years, I've been trying just about every idea I can think of to see what will propagate berry bushes and vines at home, and have settled on three techniques you may want to try yourself.

But be warned- some have much higher rates of success than others and, while they can be achieved for free, those who have some equipment at home will be able to increase their success rates accordingly.

One of the goals we have here at Hipster Homesteaders is to work on building a garden on our 3,000 square foot, south-facing hillside.

While we have many challenges associated with this, one of the biggest is that we've found buying young fruit bushes and trees for planting can be quite expensive. With the going rate and how much we want to plant on our hillside, buying all the plants, even from local sources, would cost thousands of dollars as most cuttings range from $10-$25 a pop.

Thankfully, plants are incredibly versatile. Many fruit plants can be grown from saved seeds from the previous season and others can be propagated via cuttings outright. Over the years, we've found that there is no shortage of cuttings available from neighbors in Buy Not a Thing social media groups, and as we learned more about plants, we've found many wild berry patches to cultivate from as well.

One of our first attempts at this process was with fig trees as they're known to be quite easy to propagate via cutting. We purchased a couple of trees at our local farmer's markets and received cuttings of white figs from a friend as well. When we wanted to propagate our two trees into a small orchard (along with the gifted cuttings), we thought it'd be fun to put together a fig propagation test to see what technique works the best!

In this one, we wanted to share our process and our findings.

How We Saved a Dying Passionfruit Vine – Container Gardening

How to Grow Passion Fruit in Pots Outside of the Tropics

How to Pollinate a Lemon Tree (and Others) in a Few Simple Steps

3 Ways to Propagate Berry Vines, Bushes, and Plants (for Free)

4 Fig Propagation Techniques – A Test to Find What Works