- Today was much more exciting than I expected,
and that's because I was working in the garden
and I heard this crazy, crazy sound
coming from my chicken run.
So I run over here as fast as I can.
I see chickens flying all over the place.
They're fluttering, they're screeching, they're crying,
and then I looked down at the floor
right here by the fence and there's a coyote.
Now, at first I kind of froze
'cause I didn't expect to see coyote in the daytime,
and also my dog Tefra looks a lot
like a coyote in her fur pattern.
So at first I froze, but then I chased it instinctively.
I was like, I need to get this creature away from my yard
and away from my chickens as fast as possible.
It runs over into the back into the private Madeira
and then over the wall into my neighbor's yard.
But the real crazy thing is actually what I found
inside my passion fruit tepee trellis.
So today's video, brought on by the coyotes,
all about pruning and caring for passion fruit.
But first let's take a look inside to show you what I found.
And it's that right there.
That seems to me like a little pad that a coyote dug out
so it could sleep here at night.
This passion fruit tepee trellis turns out
is the perfect habitat for coyotes
'cause it's nice and dark,
it's quiet and I'm really honestly surprised
the dogs didn't scare it away.
But it's here,
so we need to scare it away as much as possible,
and step one is gonna be pruning this.
So let's talk about why you would prune your passion fruit
besides reasons like coyotes might be living in it.
Beyond finding a coyote is living
inside your passion fruit vine,
there are actually plenty of reasons to prune it back,
and one of the major ones
is actually to control its overgrowth.
This is a passion fruit that's been in the ground now
for about two years, and 18 months is really
when they start kicking up production,
and this one is no different.
After that 18 month mark,
it absolutely floored us with passion fruit.
We have so many that we actually have a bunch of the pulp
frozen in the freezer so we could use it for drinks
throughout the wintertime.
But one of the things that you'll see here
is that this passion fruit
(foliage rustles) has layers upon layers
upon layers of growth
before you even get to the middle.
And what ends up happening is that,
I actually just found one,
these passion fruit gets stuck in there, they rot away,
they die and they turn into nothing.
So that's kind of why you wanna prune it back.
You don't see the fruit, you can't collect it.
The other problem is that if they flower
on that interior side, it's going to be really hard
for those passion fruit to get pollinated.
I have noticed that in general
that as this passion fruit has gotten bigger,
the actual pulp inside has decreased
and I think that has to do with the fact
that there's just way too much vine
for this passion fruit to actually properly feed
every single part of it.
So I believe that that's maybe a little bit of a theory
but it's definitely something I've noticed over time.
The other reason why you wanna prune it back
is that it just gets too overgrown
and starts taking over the garden.
On this side, I've had to constantly prune it back
'cause it keeps trying to creep into this bed.
If you do grow passion fruit, just make sure
that you are ready to actually commit to pruning
and controlling it 'cause it can be a bear and a beast
to actually maintain and contain.
So I'm gonna reach in here and grab a unripe
(foliage rustles)
and a ripe passion fruit that I saw earlier.
And this variety over here is called Frederick.
It's one of the most common ones in San Diego.
It seems to do really well here,
which is why you find it at all the nurseries.
So it starts off green like this guy here
and it slowly transitions into this kind of purple-ish hue.
Now, there are different varieties that, for example,
form yellow passion fruit.
This one happens to be purple.
And when it gets at this stage, it's technically ripe,
but most people like to wait
until it starts wrinkling over a little bit.
Once it forms a few wrinkles on the outer surface,
that usually indicates that it is at its sweetest point.
So you really wanna wait
and give it that extra little bit of time
so you don't get a really, really sour passion fruit.
Now, this one feels pretty heavy
whereas this one feels pretty light,
so let's actually just crack this open.
I'm just curious to see what's in here.
(passion fruit cracks) Ideally you would cut it.
Oh wow, it's actually a really nice passion fruit.
It's not fully, fully ripe enfold,
but it is actually looking pretty good.
This one is hard as a rock. (passion fruit cracks)
I've already killed it essentially,
but man, that would've actually been a really good one.
It's fully filled out on the interior
so that would've been a good passion fruit,
but it's so cold now in the wintertime
that I doubt it's gonna really do anything.
Let's talk about how to actually approach
pruning this behemoth.
I'm probably going to start on this side
and work my way down because the actual stump,
which I'll show you in a moment,
is down here on this passion fruit.
This is all from one plant
that's entirely colonized and taken over my tepee.
So my plan here is to basically peel off
all the way across halfway on both sides
and take everything off the bottom of the floor here.
That way it'll get lots of light into the interior
and hopefully deter any creatures from living inside here.
I'm gonna do it mostly with some hedge trimmers
and I also have my handy pruners.
So let's get started by just going basically crazy on it.
We'll actually, (foliage rustles)
you'll now be able to see the true structure underneath,
but there are conduit poles that form the tepee.
You might be able to see some up top,
and across each conduit pole is some string
and that's actually what they're all clinging to.
So in the process,
I'm definitely going to be cutting off some of the string.
Totally fine, I'll just have to restring it.
That's no big deal.
It's easier than trying to be careful
on making sure I don't get any of the strings
when I need to cut so much off.
So I'm gonna just start cutting this,
and then after that we'll talk about what you should do
after you prune your passion fruit to set it up for success.
As I mentioned earlier, it is towards the end of December,
so the light is fading fast.
I don't think we're gonna finish this project today
but the main thing I wanted to do, at least for now,
is clear off a major chunk of this
and actually get in here and mess up the floor entirely.
This should at least deter the coyote.
This is a little bit of a pruning passion fruit
and how to actually get rid of a coyote video.
But beyond that, all we're gonna do is grab a rake
(ground rustles) and really just mess
this whole area up.
We want to basically tell the coyote it's not welcome here.
It should find somewhere else to go
and I'm messing up your home.
So I'm gonna get in here and mess this all up.
The final thing that I'm going to do here
to keep the coyote away is actually put this light
over here in the ground.
This is one of these lights
that turn on when it gets nighttime
and it should create a bright enough light
that it'll stop a coyote from being able to sleep here.
So beyond messing it up,
opening it up so it's no longer in a shelter,
it's basically a cave, I'm also going to add this light.
So hopefully that'll keep it away,
but we'll check back tomorrow, finish this up,
and talk more about how to care for your passion fruit.
It's now day two since the coyote incident
so let's go take a peek inside the tepee trellis
and see if the coyote has been back.
So let's go take a look inside,
and to me it looks like it hasn't really been back.
So last night I came and patrolled out here
and made a bunch of sound every hour
to make sure I would scare it away in case it came back,
and so far so good.
(foliage rustles) So back to pruning.
I still need to remove this whole upper section
and then work my way around.
I'm probably gonna end up
leaving around a quarter of the plant.
This upper section is turning out to be quite the challenge
'cause it's really, really thick with growth.
It's been wrapped around and also grown over the top
so I might need to get a ladder,
but I think I'm gonna start
by going in with some hand pruners
to do a little bit more selective cuts.
I just wanna quickly show you guys how much undergrowth
and dead material is underneath this living carpet.
(foliage rustles)
(gardener laughs)
So yeah, all that is junk that's been accruing.
There's a whole bunch of moldy old passion fruits
that we never even saw so we had never the chance to eat,
and this is one of the major reasons why it's so critical
that you prune it every once in a while.
Now obviously this is gonna look quite goofy
until spring comes around
and it starts regrowing to the other side,
but the only thing I really wanna do now
that I've left about, I don't know, 30% of it
is trim off everything along the bottom
that's running away into my garden beds.
So I'm gonna come around the bottom
and maybe take it off to about knee height.
That way there's plenty of room to grow.
But the one thing I have to be careful for
is the primary stump is somewhere right there
so I wanna make sure I don't cut into that.
That ended up being quite the decent workout,
but let me bring you in really close
'cause I wanted to show you
just how massive the stump has got.
So I ended up entirely filling two giant green bins,
so that's quite a lot of material.
I honestly didn't have anywhere
to really put that in my compost.
I might let that sit in the green bins
for like a week or two and see what it looks like
and then maybe steal it back,
but for now it's definitely going in there.
And we've done a pretty decent job cleaning up.
This will be a more ongoing project
to really tidy this whole area up, redo the irrigation,
but let's pop over to the other side
and talk about how to care for this actual passion fruit
as it gets ready for springing.
It is day three of the passion fruit and coyote saga.
I'm wearing a t-shirt and shorts
'cause it's like 70 degrees.
It's even supposed to get up to 78 on Christmas,
believe it or not, which is pretty crazy for San Diego.
But we have a big pile of passion fruit to deal with,
so I'm actually going to scoop this all up
and throw it in that green bin over there.
I decided not to compost it
because passion fruit is one of these plants
that if you put any part of this in the soil it will root
and it's very easy to actually propagate.
So I don't really want to deal with that risk
of having to constantly kill off passion fruit vines
as they're rooting in my compost,
so I'm gonna opt to throw it away.
Now, in terms of the coyote,
I haven't seen any evidence of it.
There's no scat anywhere.
There's no new hovels or holes.
The dogs have been sweeping the yard constantly.
I've been checking every hour at night just to make sure
it doesn't come back and so I could scare it away,
so I think I properly scared it away.
I'm still gonna leave the chickens locked up
for the time being until we're entirely sure,
but for now, let's go ahead and scoop this all up,
throw it in the green bin
and talk about how to set this passion fruit up
for a really, really solid spring and summer
with a couple little tips down at the soil level.
Now that we're done pruning and mostly cleaning up,
it's time to actually get this going for spring.
The best way to do that
is actually (bag rustles)
through fertilizer,
and that's because passion fruit is a very heavy feeder.
You could see all around as I was cutting it down,
there was probably over 100 fruit
that I didn't even see and collect,
let alone the 100 that I did collect.
It's probably produced multiple hundreds of fruits
throughout this whole last growing season.
So, and it's all coming from this one stump
and this one section of soil.
I'm sure it's depleted in some nutrients
because it can't just go forever.
So what we're gonna do is actually just go ahead
and use a Tomato-Tone.
I know it says tomatoes and vegetables,
but all that it really matters here
is that we're looking for something that helps fruiting.
So this one is a 3-4-6, the Espoma Tomato-Tone,
and that 4-6 are the higher numbers at the end
and that usually promotes fruiting.
So what we're gonna do,
(bag rustles) I'll take a nice scoop of this
and I'm gonna scatter it
(fertilizer scatters)
all around this area.
I'm not gonna put it just at the base
because by now this plant is so large
that I'm sure it has feeder roots all throughout here,
and I wanna encourage it
to actually look for some nutrients.
So I'm gonna just chop it in a little bit,
mix it into that top little surface.
And I'm probably going to do this again in springtime.
You can feed passion fruit
up to four times a year with no problem,
and usually you would do it in the springtime,
but since in San Diego this is growing year-round basically
so it doesn't really go dormant and I could get away
with feeding it at this point of the year.
So now what we're gonna do
is we don't wanna just leave all this fertilizer
sitting on the surface, so I'm gonna come in
and cover it with some compost.
The compost is gonna do a couple different things for me.
First of all, it's gonna provide nutrients on its own.
It's also going to help retain some moisture
as we get into summer because passion fruit is thirsty.
And last but not least, it's going to provide
a lot of organic matter to help make the soil really thrive.
The other thing that it's doing right here
is covering up all that fertilizer I just spread,
and by doing so, it's actually going to now be able
to drain into the soil.
If you leave fertilizer just on top,
it's not gonna really be very effective.
You want mix it in the least a little bit
to the surface layer,
and this compost is definitely gonna help me do just that.
Of course, you shouldn't really fertilize
without actually providing some water,
so what I'm gonna do (hose spray)
is give this a gentle soaking
and really try to get at least the compost wet.
It's a little bit dry
so it might pull a little bit of water,
but I'm gonna keep working on this
and getting it nice and wet.
And this video was a little bit of a weird combination
of how to deal with a coyote, basically chase it off,
scare it, destroy its habitat if you find it,
and also how to prune a passion fruit.
But in the coming growing season,
I'll do a full care guide that's more specific
on just the passion fruit.
and let me know if you guys wanna see
how to build one of these tepee structures.
It's actually pretty easy.
It's one of the first things we did.
I don't think I could quite set up
an entire another big one,
but I could definitely show you guys how to do it,
and so just let me know in the comments
if you guys wanna see that.
But for now, I need to finish watering this
and then go inside and get ready for the holidays,
and I'll see you guys next time.
(uplifting music)