Feijoa Growing Tips and 1 Year Update - (Pineapple Guava)

hey guys it's caleb welcome back so in today's video i wanted to bring you along and show you the fijo hedge that we've got growing here this is one that i planted around a year ago and i made a video all about that but you guys have been asking me how it's been doing and it's actually been doing really well it's got quite a lot of fruit on it you can see some fruit just down there on the ground hopefully you can see that but i'll show you shortly and yeah it's been growing pretty well and i've been doing some sort of observations lately just to kind of get some idea on what works what doesn't work with feeders so i wanted to share some of those observations with you today to hopefully help you get started with growing fijos we'll give you some tips to kind of apply along the way with you growing so let's just get right into the video and come and have a look at the fijo's with me so if you remember this is how the trees looked when we first put them in compared with how they look now so the trees have grown up quite a bit and they're all looking really nice and healthy and because it's autumn now as well the fruits are starting to ripen up and drop off the trees one of the things a lot of people recommend with fruit trees is to take off a lot of the fruit for the first year just to allow the tree to get its roots down and established and start to grow a bit more as opposed to spending a lot of energy creating the fruit and what i've done is not followed that i've kind of just let them do what they want to do and so some of the trees didn't produce any fruit at all and some produced quite a lot and then there was others kind of in between where they just produced a handful of fruit and so i just wanted to do a bit of an experiment to see if the trees that didn't grow any fruit on their own would end up growing bigger or faster than the trees that had a lot of fruit on them it doesn't seem to be much of a difference if any at all most of the trees are about the same size despite the amount of fruit they have on them and in fact the largest tree that's in this line is one of the trees that has the most fruit on it so although it's got a lot of fruit it doesn't seem to have affected its growth at all and i think probably a lot of the reason for that is that these were planted back in autumn so they had all of the autumn and winter to establish and get their roots down and once they flower they were already established enough to be able to hold those fruits and go through the summer without being affected whereas if i were to plant them in the springtime it would probably be a good idea to take the fruit and the flowers off at that stage because they're going to be fruiting straight away and you've only just put them in the ground so if you're planting them in the spring i would probably take the fruit off just for that first year and it's only going to be another year until they flower again and you might get some fruit off them but it's really up to you if you decide to remove the fruit or not but do you want to have a look at this fruit i'll bring it in a little bit closer and i'll open it up and see what it looks like yum so there we go i'll give it a taste really really juicy it's a bit hard still and it's quite a sharp flavor but i really like fijos when they are more of a sharp flavor as opposed to being super sweet and the other thing with fijo's is i like to eat the skin as well so it does help to balance out the sweetness of a fijo so you can just eat the skin just like that nothing like a homegrown fijo and just like these ones because they're on the ground that means they're ripe so once they've dropped off and you feel a little bit of softness to the skin then they're good to eat otherwise you can give the tree a gentle shake and any that fall off like this one just did that means that they're ripe and you can see that there's a little bit of give there to the skin so it's good to go i believe one of the most important things when it comes to growing fruit trees and particularly fijo trees is having a good amount of mulch underneath them so what we've got here is just some arborist mulch it's just basically chewed up trees that have gone through a mulcher with leaves bark branches all that kind of thing and this is slowly breaking down and providing nutrients to the trees but more importantly it's providing a really good environment for the roots that's moist it's cool during you know the hot summers and it's a bit warmer in the winter for them as well and feeders do have really shallow surface feeder roots and so it is important to protect those roots from those kind of harsh elements of drying out getting saturated all that kind of thing whereas if you have a good mulch it's really going to stabilize the soil reduce the amount of weeds that you're going to have and things like that and what we've found is that we haven't actually had to water our fijo trees all summer and you know it probably would have benefited them to water them i'm not saying don't water your trees especially in their first year i'd say it is pretty important too however like you can see we've got quite a bit of fruit on these fijo trees without the need to even water them once despite having some long periods of drought and the ground being super dry even right next to the trees but what i'm quite keen to do is just dig through this mulch we'll have a bit of a look together at the soil underneath this mulch and then we'll dig a hole right next to the fijo trees just on the bare soil that's next to them and just compare the soil to show how much of a difference that mulch makes and hopefully there is a bit of a difference so come on in and we can take a bit of a look so digging down into this mulch here you can already see that we've got surface roots of the feed jar just through here and they you know the ground is there's quite a bit of moisture in it there's a little worm just here you can see that and another one just there if i get a bit of it you can see that it's there's there's actually a good amount of moisture in there it's nice dark soil looks really healthy the ground you know you can break it up with your hand it's not like a dry dust bowl or a dry hard compacted soil you know it's easily pliable it's quite good so to compare let's just have a look at the ground just next to where we just dug so we'll come over here and we'll just see what it's like check that out it's dusty so super dry so you know you can see how much of a difference that mulch has made this ground is just like honestly just dust and hard compacted dirt so yeah mulch is very very important and i always advocate for that around your fruit trees it will help so much the tree will stay a lot happier i wanted to point out this tree to you here so this is one that we bought from the nursery for 25 dollars whereas all the rest of the trees along here were only 10 and the reason for that was well we got it from a different place but also this was a larger tree at the time but what i've found is that all of the other trees have you know provided quite a bit of fruit and some of the trees have actually overtaken this tree now in size and most of them are actually around about this size anyway and so kind of what i wanted to indicate to you guys is that although this tree was you know two and a half times the price of the other trees it hasn't provided one fruit at all this whole year and it hasn't even grown very much either since we planted it whereas the other trees have established a lot better and a lot faster and have just pumped their roots out pumped the growth out and pretty much caught up to this tree here so i kind of just wanted to show you that you know if you're deciding between a tree that's maybe this big and then one that's a little bit bigger but a lot dearer then i would recommend just maybe going for the smaller tree if you want to save some money but also get a tree that's going to probably out compete this tree or at least catch up to it within a year or two anyway so this tree here is easily the smallest tree that we've got in the whole hedge and there is a reason for that and that's because the whole tree snapped in half so what happened is the ties that were around it ended up coming off during when we had a lot of wind and the whole tree just snapped there was not one branch not one leaf anything like that left on the tree and i was a bit gutted at first but i knew that it would probably bounce back anyway because fijos are super hardy they don't mind a really heavy prune and yeah they're just very resilient trees so although it didn't have any leaves it's fully sprouted back all i did was just chop it off at the top so it was a nice clean cut and then it's just sprouted all these new branches so although it has slowed the tree down and this is still a lot smaller than the other trees i would say that probably within the next year or two it will be caught up to all the rest of the trees and you know you won't even notice that that had happened but one thing that i think is important to note with fijo trees and any fruit tree really when it comes to staking is that you do want to allow your tree to have quite a good amount of movement anyway especially if you're in a windy site because this will mean that the tree will be able to respond by putting out stabilizing roots by thickening up in the trunk and branches and because it knows it's in a windy site it's going to respond like that whereas if you tied it really super tight against the stake and didn't allow any movement then the tree is never going to know that it needs to you know get a lot stronger and resilient to survive those strong winds so yeah make sure when you tie them that they still have a really good amount of movement but not so much movement that they bend right over and then end up snapping off like this one did here if you're planting a fijo hedge like we have here one thing to consider is the size of the varieties that you're planting so these two trees here are actually more of a smaller variety they're called wiki two so what we've done is made sure we've put these two on the end of the hedge and we've also put them on the northern end and that's where all of our sun comes from here in the southern hemisphere so having them on the northern end is just going to make sure that they get plenty of sun and they're not going to get shaded out by other trees and they're also not going to shade out ones that are larger further down if you're planting fijo trees as well it's also a good idea to have at least two trees just to help with cross-pollination they'll do a lot better that way even the self-pollinating varieties like unique will benefit from having another pollinator tree it's also a good idea to just look at the variety of tree that you're buying and when it's going to fruit you can have sort of early season mid-season and late season fijos so if you're planting at least two trees you may as well get kind of an early season and a mid-season or early in the late so that you can span the amount of fruit that you get over a longer period of time so in terms of feeding your fijo trees what we've done is well actually me lying here is showing a bit of commitment to this video because what we've done is put some sheep manure around the base of our trees here and so we've kind of just sprinkled it on top of the mulch you could probably pull the mulch back and sprinkle it on the soil to allow it to kind of break down quicker and have worms and stuff decomposing that around um but where you kind of just did it the lazy way and just threw some sheet manure on top and figured that as it rains it's going to break down and eventually wash down into the soil anyway but aside from that we've obviously got the mulch here which is going to break down over time that's literally all we've done and i'll probably look at trialling putting some cover crops around them so some nitrogen fixing ones like the lupines that i did around in the food forest because that's a good way to add some nitrogen to the soil by using material that you have or that you can grow and so i'll probably just sow some seeds around here in the springtime and then once i cut those cover crops back down those will release a whole lot of nitrogen back into the soil and allow these plants to use that but yeah like these trees are pretty good they won't need too much even just a bit of mulch is is going to really help your trees out anyway guys that pretty much does it for me today but if you guys have anything to add then feel free to leave a comment below with other tips or advice that you have about fijos so that other people can read that and if you want to learn more about fijos then feel free to check out the other videos i have here on my channel and if you have any comments or questions then please leave them down in the comment section below and i'll see you down there hope you have a great rest of your day

Channel: TheKiwiGrower

Views: 34,735

Rating: 4.9317584 out of 5

Keywords: feijoa, feijoa fruit, feijoa tree, pinapple guava, guavasteen, how to grow feijoa, feijoa hedge, feijoa varieites, feejoa, fijoa, planting feijoa trees, feijoa care guide, how to care for feijoa trees, feijoa growing requirments, grow feijoas, harvesting feijoa fruit, autumn fruit, unusual fruit, feijoa new zealand, fruit native to brazil, south american fruit, food forest fruit trees, shrub fruit trees, fruiting hedge, fruiting shrub, understory fruit, food forest

Id: Opj2fcqGpG0

Length: 11min 6sec (666 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 10 2021