The summer was actually quite a hot and dry one this year, which makes a nice change for Wellingtonians, but was not ideal for the garden! I assumed poroporo was weedy enough in it's tendencies to battle on regardless, and so did not make special effort to water them through the really dry periods and they suffered a bit. At one stage I thought they had been attacked by psyllids containing the Solanaceous Liberibacter bacterium, but the brown lesions and wilting were most likely symptomatic of the dry conditions and physiological suffering which attends this. Thank goodness there are no laws against the mistreatment of plants!
We expanded our menagerie in late summer to include two gold-laced Wyandotte hens, whose favourite "in-between-meal" snack seems to be poroporo leaves. And even though the plants behind the chicken coop are now bereft of leaves to a height of one metre, chicken max headroom, this doesn't seem to have set the plants back too much. Indeed, they are no further behind the other poroporo along the back fence which haven't received such close inspection by their Galliform neighbours. There are few flowers, however, which means scant fruit.
I must admit here to being a bit chicken myself. The plant in the front garden, which is now very well established, has been producing ripe fruit for months. Not just ripe but exceedingly ripe, ripe to the point where the skins split open and they fall to the ground and rot. At any point I could intervene in this cycle of life and actually try one, but it took me until yesterday to bolster enough courage to actually do so. And I did. And as a fruit it is quite indifferent. Full of seeds, the orange flesh tastes something like a guava. Actually not unlike the taste of a pepino. I am not convinced they would make good jam. All seedy like raspberry but without the delicious flavour. Jelly perhaps. Cooking the fruit to a mush and straining over night in a jelly bag, and then boiling the next day with sugar to setting point (if there is enough pectin in the fruit) - but I'd need half a kilo of fruit to make a single jar I would think, which looks unlikely this year.
And besides, the first aim of the experiment was science. How long would it take to increase fruit size under selection for larger fruit? I have to own now, having seen the fruit under macroscope, that this is most certainly not going to be a commercial enterprise!
