I kept alluding to this post, but i guess here it finally is. WARNING! this is serious gardening talk. be advised its not for the faint of heart.
One of my big task i set for myself this year was to prune the passion fruit I have in israel. so here is what it looked like when i got there, after 2 years of rampant growth.
Look at that monster! its got tendrils everywhere! you couldn’t find any fruit. and it was a huge mess of vines.
since the jet lag hit me pretty badly this trip, i would wake up around 6 and work for a few hours before everyone else was ready for the day. my first job was to untangle the monster. i did this by trying to isolate single vines, and roll them up keep them from breaking.
this is what that process looked like. this is probably 2 days of work? can you still see the tangle in there? see my tea in the bottom left hand corner. you have to be civilized while pruning.
i think the next day i was making progress.
this method worked really well for keeping the vines from breaking.
some of those piles got pretty big. this was one of the main trunks. most of the fruit sets on new growth, and there were some fruits still on these larger vines, so i paid special attention to keeping these alive.
look how thick this trunk is after only 2 years of growth. CRAZYNESS! i guess thats what the wonderful israeli heat does for plants. so exciting.
the main trouble was as this plant was not trained when young, there were vines growing in really odd shapes. i had to try to wrangle them into some semblance of order.
and another view, things are starting to look much better. from this point on, i bunched up all the vines, and hung them off the wire.
then i started unrolling the vines and looping them back and forth along the guide wire. getting all the vines bunched together, and off the ground, allows me in the future to prune much easier. you just cut everything a foot below the guide wire, to promote new growth and the currently bunched vines become the main trunk lines. the few hanging vines with fruit can be seen hanging down and those would be cut in the future to prune. and now when fruit falls (when its ripe) you can actually see it and collect it! genius!
so heres what it turned out to look like, after probably 6 mornings worth of work.
Since i was jet lagged, and even though i was on vacation, waking up every morning in order to garden in the cool morning air, was wonderful. once the sun hit you, it was way to hot to do any yard work, so the morning was a perfect time. the sun would also set way to early to get any work done in the evenings. it was a lot of work, but i had fun wrangling that plant. and i guess i learned my lesson, make sure the thing is trained properly. i guess i could of just chopped it and planted a new one, but this was a lot more fun! i look forward to a lot more tasty passion fruits in the future.