How to Grow Feijoa / Pineapple Guava – The Ultimate Garden-to-Plate Guide

Quick Tips on How to Grow Feijoa at Home

Popular Feijoa Varieties

Feijoas are commonly sold as seedling plants under the name Pineapple Guava or Feijoa Sellowiana these will perform with mixed results and can take 6+ years to start fruiting. Choosing a grafted or named variety will offer a quicker-producing tree that will be true to type. Varieties will vary from country to country.

Duffy – Medium – large-sized fruit. Popular all-around variety.

White Goose – Large fruit with juicy white flesh. Early season fruiting that can last quite a long time.

Mammoth – Large round fruit with thick wrinkled skin. Can benefit from a pollinator tree. Tall upright tree.

Apollo – Medium – large oval fruit. Smooth light green skin. Tall upright tree. Semi-self-fertile – benefits from another pollinator tree.

Unique – Medium-sized fruit. Smooth, juicy, and sweet. Starts fruiting from a young age.

Triumph – Medium-sized fruit. Slightly gritty but good flavour. Late season bearing.

Nazemetz – Large oval/pear-shaped fruit. Smooth skin with sweet flesh. Self-fertile but will bear heavily with cross-pollination.

QUICK TIPS ON HOW TO GROW FEIJOA

When to Plant Feijoa Trees

Plant your Feijoa plants in Spring or Autumn to avoid added stress from summer and winter temperatures.

How to Grow Feijoa

To plant your Feijoa, pick a sunny spot, they like full sun for 6-8 hours at least. And quite a bit of space, as these trees will grow quite large (2-5m). You can prune them back heavily though, so it’s not a major issue. They will also grow well in a large pot.

Dig a hole twice as big as the pot and mix a little compost in with the soil. If your plant has tightly bound roots, free them up before planting them out. Firmly pack the soil back around and cover it with mulch. Just pull back the mulch from the trunk so you don’t rot the trunk. Feijoas have shallow feeder roots so keep weeds and plants at a minimum under the tree line.

Give it big water! Now you basically don’t have to do anything for the first couple of years except keep it watered, especially during the dry season. You may get flowers in the first year or it makes take a couple of years until it is established enough to put out flowers. It flowers in spring and the fruits are usually ready and ripe in Autumn.

How to Care and Maintain Feijoa Trees

Feeding

Once your tree is established and starting to flower and fruit you can look at more fertilizing and watering. You can feed your plants near the end of winter, spring, and summer with compost or worm teas, or liquid seaweed. I don’t do a lot of feeding but I do chop and drop the prunings and add layers of mulch each year.

Watering

Another key tip is to ensure your plants get plenty of water during summer and late summer as the fruits are developing. This is something we struggle with here in Perth because we basically get no rain in summer. This last summer was so dry in Perth, and my trees were loaded with fruit. I obviously didn’t water them enough for the amount of fruit they had and the results are a strange hollow center. The fruit still tastes delicious, just not quite as juicy as it should be.

So I will have more mulch and more water next season. From memory, I was only hand watering max twice a week, and it was extremely hot here, so I’m not surprised really.

Pruning

Once your feijoas have finished fruiting, and you have picked up all the dropped fruit. It can be a good time to prune your trees if you want. I like to prune mine each year so that the fruit is always within reach. Otherwise, it ends up over the neighbor’s fence or is bruised from falling so far to the ground. Feijoas love a prune and it can actually improve fruiting. I cut back about 20-30% each year and I find that it grows back about that much so my trees stay relatively the same height by doing this.

Plus, by cutting back 20% of the tree, I get a whole lot of green material to chop and drop. In my food forest-style garden, I don’t remove anything so all prunings go directly back into the garden. I prune using hedge shears or loppers for larger branches and then run them through my small mulcher. You can also chop them into small pieces, then lay them around the trees. This will break down and act as a natural fertilizer.

Pollination

You may notice lots of small birds in your trees when they are flowering. Don’t worry as they are helping pollinate the flowers. They harvest the nectar and also eat the petals but generally allow the main flower to stay put and fruit. Bees and small birds are the main types of pollinators.

One tree will still perform amazingly as they are self-fertile but having multiple just increases your harvests. It can also extend your season. Meaning different varieties take longer or shorter to flower or ripen and you can get extended harvests.

One thing to note is that feijoas ripen quickly and in bulk. So they come in hard and fast.

Pests / Disease

Rats and possums will love your fruit, and also parrots and birds. You may want to net or bag fruits if you are worried. I definitely have rats and parrots but so far I haven’t needed to bag fruit as they are doing minimal damage to my large harvests. Fruit flies and guava moths are also a problem in other areas. Again, this would mean you need to bag the fruit or net the tree when the fruit is young before they get stung.

How/ When to Harvest Feijoa

Now comes the fun part – harvesting. How do we tell when the fruit is ripe if it remains green? Well, it falls off the tree. So each morning, you can go out and pick up all the fruit from the ground. It is important to pick all the fruit up because otherwise, you will attract pests like rats and possums, or fruit flies. Feijoas do continue to ripen off the tree so you want to eat them quite quickly or use and preserve them. I like the tartness of fresh feijoas, and they get sweeter and more perfumy as they ripen, which is why I never like feijoas from the stores, as I find them too overripe.

Most people will cut the fruit in half and scoop out the inside to eat but you can eat the whole fruit. Especially when they are quite ripe the skin is sour and the inside is sweet it has a nice balance.

Reproducing

Ripe feijoas may have small brown seeds inside. These can be planted in moist soil. Feijoas do not grow true to type from seed so they may produce fruit different from the one you saved the seeds from.

Ways to cook and use Feijoa

Feijoas are delicious when eaten fresh off the tree. You can eat the whole fruit or cut it in half and scoop out the insides. Once they fall from the tree, they may still be a little tart. Allow them to ripen for a few days, and they will become softer, sweeter, and juicier. However, they will continue to ripen and become over-ripe. Fruit flies may also find them on the bench, so I like to keep them in the fridge.

Feijoa flowers are beautiful, and the petals are edible. I saved a bunch to add to teas. Just carefully remove the soft white and pink petals without removing the whole flower.

Feijoa pairs well with: Ginger, Coconut, Apple, Cinnamon, Chilli, Citrus, Pear, Nuts, Dark chocolate, Yogurt

Feijoa ideas:

• Juices
• Smoothies
• Cakes
• Jam
• Crumble
• Muffins
• Icecream

Preserving your Feijoa Harvest

Feijoa trees, once mature, will produce bucketloads of fruit! They can be frozen to use in smoothies and juices or baking, or preserved in jams, chutney, alcohol infusions, and bottled.

More Feijoa Tips and Recipes

What Edible Plants to Grow for Mulch and Improve Sandy Soil

Feijoa skin chutney – A Zero-Waste Recipe

Feijoa crumble slice

Beginners Guide to Edible Flowers

Other Grow Guides