There is plenty of debate around growing seedling plants vs a grafted named cultivar. I have thought also that you needed the latter in order to achieve great fruiting results, but Leon (who has a successful orchard in Sydney) explains that is not necessarily so.

This information was originally written as a reply to a post here, but comments can be tricky to find again, so I am giving Leon’s words their own space. It’s welcome advice, relevant to anyone trying to grow their own feijoas, but especially here in the extreme temperatures and water-restricted climate of Australia.

Thanks Leon.

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In my experience it isn’t that seedling grown feijoa trees are the problem when it comes to failure to fruit, rather:

1. Plant location doesn’t attract pollinators (bees don’t pollinate feijoas – birds such as noisy miners that eat the petals and brush across the flowers do). Especially for smaller trees, failure to open the tree up by pruning to allow birds easy access hinders pollination.

2. Most Feijoas are somewhat non-self-fertile, including most of the commercial varieties to some degree. Best to have two different varieties that flower at similar times next to each other (two seedling grown trees will, naturally, be different varieties from each other).

3. In Australia if fruit-fly, tussock moths, longicorn beetles, or slugs and snails don’t destroy the flowers or fruit, the heat probably will if you are not careful. A thick layer of mulch on the ground (say 15cm of grass clippings) to cover and keep the feeder roots – which are very near the surface – cool and moist is most important. If, shortly after fruit set, like in the last few days of November 2009, there is a heatwave (43-45°C for three days straight), you will likely lose most or all of your fruit, unless your trees are shaded and/or you have maintained a heavy pruning regime (giving the tree a large trunk to volume and hence water transport capacity to fruit ratio).

If I had just one seed-grown tree, I would hand-pollinate the flowers each year to be sure of a crop (and see how self-fertile or otherwise the tree is). Flowers are viable for up to a week if the weather remains under 20°C, for only a day if the temperature goes above 35°C, so you would be wise to pollinate at least every second day when the flowers are on the tree.

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Leon has a 240 tree feijoa research orchard in Western Sydney – all his trees were seed grown and bear fruit, to the delight of the local kiwi population. When he posted this information, he was in the 14th year of a 15 year project to identify Australian climate suitable trees.