Best time to pick a Maypop?

From what I've read and heard, the maypop fruit is at its peak ripeness and flavor when it turns wrinkly and yellow.

This one is still green, but pretty wrinkly. It's looked like this for about a week. I guess it'll turn more yellow soon when it's fully ripe.

Anyone harvested them before and know the time frame that they take to ripen?

They can vary. The only way to know for sure is to try. I've found they are like many wild fruits; they have a narrow window for ripeness just before going bad. But I don't like sourness. If you can tolerate it better, or if you are sweetening it in a drink or something, you can widen that window. I need to pick some to try, now that you remind me, when I go pick some elderberries this weekend.

Being red-green color vision deficient, I can't really rely on color.  That one looks greener (less yellow) than I would expect for a ripe fruit, but the wrinkled skin tells me it's done for the season, so you might as well open it and see what you won.  

In my experience they are sometimes good when still at the smooth green state, and most reliably sweet and good at the wrinkly yellow state.  But it does vary a lot, perhaps based on whether they got enough water to ripen/"fill out" properly.  It's real common, here in a dry year, to find them with essentially no fruity goodness inside, no matter the state of the outer skin.

All I can say is that when I'm faced with a mess of fruit that I'm trying to decide whether to pick, I eat a couple.  If they're ripe and good, I pick; if not, then not.

This is how far along they are here. The seeds are still soft enough to eat whole.

Mine are nowhere near ripe. I wait until they feel full of goo (heavy) then I start eating them as citrus. It’s impossible to find them all anyway, so you will get a chance to eat all stages! This is the first year I have grown them formally usually just find them. We had a really dry summer until this month and they are probably behind a little. Usually I get them best in October this climate (probably similar to hilly NC

The leaves on your tree looks either dead or curled up and stressed. So I think the fruit got terminated prematurely. They will probably ripen for you in September, right up until 1st frost.  

S Bengi wrote:The leaves on your tree looks either dead or curled up and stressed. So I think the fruit got terminated prematurely. They will probably ripen for you in September, right up until 1st frost.  

Yeah, after looking a little closer, it looks like a rabbit probably cut the stem and the fruit didn't fully ripen.

I cut it open and tasted it, and it wasn't ripe yet unfortunately.

I tasted a little, and it's hard to describe the taste, something like a mix of citrus and cucumbers to me, in its unripe state.

A good number of the seeds were black and hard and look like they will be viable, so at least I was able to get a few seeds from it that I hope to plant in the food forest soon.

I can't wait to hopefully taste some ripe ones soon!

I finally got to taste a perfectly ripe fruit. It was still green and only a little soft. It tasted great! It seemed  to have more than one flavor that hit at different times. It reminded me of banana. A slightly less ripe fruit was a little tart, but I really liked it. I tried a wrinkled fruit. It was dry and no flavor.  None of them got yellow. The best ones were a little lighter, slightly softer, and heavier.

I think I have about 50 fruits from one vine in 6x8 greenhouse.  They probably wont all ripen in time. The greenhouse was unnecessary. It was just too cold and muddy when I planted that one. The outdoor vines did great but they are a year younger.

This one was slightly tart but good.

I've always followed the wisdom of waiting for them to fall off the vine naturally after they prune up (like pawpaw).

Does anyone know where to get these in (eastern?) Canada?

I asked for them through about a half dozen places but most haven’t even heard of it. Only the hardy may pop would survive here, I think its caerulea, but maybe its the other popular var.

I just got a shipment of Passiflora seeds from https://www.rarexoticseeds.com/en/, I believe they're based out of Montreal. They have both Caerulea (blue passionflower) and Incarnata (Maypop). These are the two most common cold hardy species.

I'm not sure if either will be able to tolerate Canada's  winters, but another option that may be a little harder to find is Passiflora colvillii. It is a hybrid between incarnata and caerulea and I've seen that its roots can withstand -20F (-28C).

Looking tasty Ken!

That reminds me, I need to go pick some maypops!

+1 to Alexander's comment to wait until maypops are ready to fall off the vine to pick them. You can shake the trellis or tree they are climbing and gather any that fall off. I have also been known to tug on them VERY GENTLY and those that pop right off will be good too, but if there is any resistance I leave them on the vine. The appearance doesn't matter much—some will be very smooth and green and others will be wrinkled.

In Uncommon Fruits for Every Garden, Lee Reich recommends leaving the fruit on the counter after picking for a while (as much as a couple of weeks) to improve, and I have found that to be a good practice. They will get more wrinkled and the skin will dry out, eventually making the skin pretty hard and shrinking the fruit. I like them before they get to that point (when they are close to molding), but after they have wrinkled a bit, which seems to enhance their sweetness.

I'm referring to the incarnata species, which we have many of growing wild here in southern Missouri.

Eon MacNeill wrote:Does anyone know where to get these in (eastern?) Canada?

I asked for them through about a half dozen places but most haven’t even heard of it. Only the hardy may pop would survive here, I think its caerulea, but maybe its the other popular var.

I got my plant from Richters Seeds in 2022 - that's passiflora incarnata. I also bought passiflora caerulea seeds that same year and had a few sprout.

I left them in-ground and they managed to survive the winter, however, that was under 1ft of leaf+wood chip mulch, and snow piled on top, and in a mild zone 6 during a much milder than average winter where it only dropped below -15C three times (Dec 24, Feb 3, Feb 4) and had the following monthly average highs and lows.

Dec 2022: 3.2C/-3.2C
Jan 2023: 2.1C/-2.9C
Feb 2023: 4.4C/-5.3C
Mar 2023: 6.1C/-4.9C

Despite that, the plants did not "pop" in May. The two largest caerulea plants sprouted in early June, and the smallest caerulea and maypop sprouted on July 1st. They were also very slow growing at the beginning, especially the ones that sprouted only in July, so by the end of the season, the two biggest caeruleas were only 8ft tall, the maypop only 3ft, and the smallest caerulea less than a foot... Normally the caerulea should be 15-20ft, and the maypop 10ft - that's how big they got on their 2022 season.

However, I also took cuttings in fall 2022, and those did great.

2022 in-ground:
-caerulea barely any flowers, 15-20ft tall
-maypop many flowers, 10ft tall, no fruit

2023 in-ground
-caerulea, no flowers, 8ft tall
-maypop, no flowers, 3ft tall

2023 cuttings from previous year, in containers
-caerulea, abundance of flowers, 15 ft vines, but more numerous vines than in 2022
-maypop, abundance of flowers, 8-10ft tall, fruits beginning to set in mid-late August.

Although the caerulea is supposedly hard to only zone 7, vs zone 5-6 for the maypop, if this is accurate, it might refer to the root system rather than the vines. The vines of the maypop die back earlier, at about -2C to -3C, while the caerulea vines can withstand -10C temperatures (they died back at -15C for me).

It seems like the caerulea may be better adapted to cool climates like the high Andes or England, while the maypop is adapted to the southern US which has colder winter extremes, but is otherwise milder. Therefore, the maypop expects to die back once summer is over, and requires very warm soil to sprout, whereas the caerulea will try to remain evergreen through mild winters and grows better in milder weather in the 60s-70s. My Maypops already started to look semi dormant in late September this year, from days in the 60s and nights in the 40s, not so for the caerulea which was still quite green even in November last year.


Anyways, not sure when my maypop fruit will ripen. A couple broke off this weekend and they did have pulp, but the pulp was white with white/light green seeds. We have only a week of warm weather left, and after that the best I can do is a south facing window.