Feijoa pruning

When the last feijoa has fallen off, you can have a real go at it.

No difficult techniques needed (as with apples and pears and grapes – thinking a year or more ahead!): Feijoas fruit on new wood that grows in spring.

So even if you literally whack them with a hedge trimmer (I do that!), next spring’s new growth will give you fruit.

But what about a tree that’s getting a bit too high?

Easy: you can really cut them back quite hard, because they’ll grow again; but seeing you’re going to do some surgery, you might as well do it real well: thin some of the branches inside the tree; That opens up the interior and gives the new growth a bit of space.

It also gives the birds a bit of wriggle room to move.

Birds – like blackbirds and silvereyes – are the main pollinators of the feijoa flowers!

(hence the colour red – birds can see red well)

If you see a blackbird violently attacking the red flower stamens in late spring, don’t panic! It’s doing its job.

For those of you that consider having a feijoa tree in the garden, here are two tips:

1) plant two trees next to each other (they require crosspollination)

2) Plant them now, while there is still some warmth in the soil – otherwise they’d sulk most of the winter.

Sunny, well-drained soil – little bit of fertiliser each spring, topped by compost of good mulch, to keep roots moist during dry periods.

For the sixteenth floor, may I suggest a reasonably large pot with quality Living Earth Tub mix and the variety Bambina, a small grafted plant with small feijoas that can be eaten skin-and-all.

Just a bit of liquid fertiliser and regular watering – you’ll love it!