Taranaki
Mei Leng Wong catches up with Chris Davidson, grafted passionfruit pioneer.
Adhering to advice to self-isolate, Chris couldn’t leave his house, so traded groceries and shopping duties for passionfruit. “Well, I couldn’t sell them at the markets during the lockdown anyway,” he explains. “And the neighbours seemed pretty happy with the deal.”
Well, that’s what you get for living next to (arguably) the country’s best passionfruit grower; one who pioneered the grafting of fruiting vines onto diseaseresistant granadilla stock more than a decade ago in his Oratia nursery in west Auckland.
Some five years ago, he decided to leave New Zealand’s biggest city. “The main thing was to get out of Auckland,” he says of the move, “where everything was just getting worse by the year! The traffic noise… Everything!”
He found three “very flat” acres in Taranaki with three main paddocks and friable soil, after a real estate agent described it to him. “I was just driving around anyway,” he recalls. “So I said I would have a look, and I saw it had a big shed which is handy.
“Since I’ve been here, I’ve also built a greenhouse because it’s so windy and we need the shelter. The paddocks had stock grazing, and I’ve leased them because I only use a portion of it.”
That portion is (naturally) planted with his own grafted passionfruit. He used to grow purple passionfruit for export, but when an entire shipment was rejected because of a mealybug problem, he started tinkering with grafting the plants.
Think ”grafted passionfruit” sounds familiar? You might remember the November 2009 article about Chris in
NZ Gardener in which Lynda Hallinan raved about these highly productive plants (the mag still gets very regular emails from people who read the story and want Chris‘s contacts, more than ten years on!).
“Since the 2009 NZ Gardener article about me, I haven’t had to advertise and people are still calling me based on that,” he explains.
Nowadays, Chris sells both fruit and grafted plants of his prized vines at farmer’s markets.
He has also planted tamarillos and maintained the kiwifruit that were already on the property.
He and his plants are well settled now, but he says it has been a strange growing season, and not just on account of a global pandemic.
“There was not as much rain last winter as we should’ve had. The water table is not too high and that has affected things. Most things have survived but some haven’t produced anything at all.”
The vines were slow to flower this year despite regular watering, he noted, and still had fruit on them well into autumn when we spoke over the phone in lockdown.
While Chris took 230kg of fruit from just three vines last year, this year he expects only half that, as the spring had also been cold, “and that would be the main thing. One plant didn’t start till early November and usually it’s all over by then.”
The one advantage Taranaki seems to have over Auckland is that he doesn't get pūkeko on his crop.
“In Auckland, they used to go after the passionfruit. They’d climb up the vines and run around trampling everything.” He also doesn’t miss the passionvine hoppers – “hardly any to worry about here compared to in Auckland.” He still watches out for grease spot (caused by the bacterium Pseudomonas passiflorae, it infects leaves, stems and fruit, and could lead to severe crop losses and vine death), but does not find it particularly difficult to manage.
General maintenance varies depending on the time of year, but have not changed greatly since the move from Auckland. “I feed them Nitrophoska Blue when the fruit is growing and every 10 days or fortnight, as they’re gross feeders.” The vines also benefit from his own blend of homemade compost and manure.
Along with the passionfruit vines, Chris had also brought tamarillo cuttings from Auckland.
“The cuttings bush out better than seedlings.”
On account of this year’s “strange season”, the tamarillos growing outside put out masses of leaves but not much else. “They’re still alive, but I don’t think they’d grow much. They’re still green but there’s no fruit.” The five in the greenhouse are watered more regularly, and are doing better, he reports, and at least one can be described as “exceptionally good.”
Chris had also brought two ice-cream bean trees. “Some fruited last year, but not this year.” He has started composting and mulching, “and now they’re looking better.
Although he‘s technically ”semi-retired” now, he does a bit of woodturning too.
“I make various things and design furniture like stools and small tables, bowls and household things. Now I’m supposed to be retired, that’s what I do.” ✤