Passion Fruit PRUNING Demo | by as much as 90% !!! | Bonus: Humming Bird Chicks Being Fed! :-)

Hi, I'm Charles Malki, biologist and plant expert with Ivory Organics, where we grow cool plants, and today we're going to be talking all about pruning your passion fruit vines. As you can see, this passion fruit vine that's over my head has completely outgrown its space. I'll share with you where it's starting just in front of me, to it's now racing about 10 more feet behind me, starting to climb up on the roof, starting to climb up into the trees. We're going to manage the passion fruit in this video lesson today, and then we're going to go from this actually clone from the parent plant, which is against the wall, and we're going to also be pruning the original parent plant that we planted about six years ago. I'm going to talk about trellis systems and what works best between these two different trellis systems that we've used for harvesting and managing and maintaining the health of these vines from year to year. So let's get started. So here we are now at the base of one of the clone passion fruit vines, and again, this is a clone off of the parent that's just behind me. I don't know if you can spot that right behind the banana that we just recently pruned down, and we'll review those lessons in just a second, but take a look at this clone passion fruit. You can see this is now entering year two. You can see it's about the thickness of my finger or maybe a little bit larger than a pencil or a pen, and then it basically divides into... I'm hoping you can capture both. We actually did two starter vines, one and two right here on each side, and we basically wrapped them around this green stake that's in between, and we've created this trellis system that's created out of using these vinyl-wrapped metal stakes, and again, we didn't use... The reason we want the vinyl is to make sure that it doesn't conduct heat and doesn't burn the vine that's resting upon these steel-reinforced stakes. So that's our system. We've used larger metal stakes in addition to some smaller ones, but once we prune it, you'll see the entire structure, and I'll share with you how we actually even constructed it as well, but when it comes to pruning your vine, this is a wonderful time to be pruning your plant, and here we are now the first week of March in Los Angeles, and the temperatures are beginning to warm. There's a lot of sunlight that's now hitting the plant, and if I can share with you some of the tips here, like if you can take a look here, you can see there's a lot of new growth. I've been watching this week after week, and it probably grew at least two to three inches every single week for the last two to three weeks, and within the next 30 to 60 days, I expect this to bloom, and keep in mind, and this is something important to consider, is depending on the variety of plants within your garden, when it comes to passion fruit, they flower on their new growth, meaning that if I prune this hard, all of that new growth has the ability to still flower and fruit. There's other plants such as, let's say, our apple tree that we have in the corner. If we prune that hard, I could, in essence, remove all the flower buds that will then affect my ability to, one, the apple's not going to flower, which means we're not going to get to enjoy fruit that year. So some plants, you've got to be very careful with your pruning techniques. When it comes to passion fruit, you can go hard, and what we're going to do in this video is we're going to prune our passion fruits by as much as 90 percent. We're basically going to keep what I've been using now for a few times throughout these video lessons over the last couple of years, but I'm going to share it again one more time. Being the heart of the plant, I'm going to define, and the area that I want to protect is going to be the trunk of the plant, which is from the ground to the top of the vine, which is right here where my hand is, up in this area, and then from this zone is where all the branches are coming out, and then creating this trellis that then runs about 10 to 15 feet behind me. So what we're going to do is we're going to protect the trunk, which I'm defining as the part that's running up and down, and then the part that's running horizontal across, I'm going to then prune that down to about 90 percent. For pruning your passion fruit, all you'll simply need is something like your paper scissors for your smaller vines, such as these little ones. You can simply prune them quite easily with paper scissors. For your larger vines, you may need to your garden pruners, such as these. Let me share with you the parent plant and what we ended up dealing with last year. Come and check this out. So if you stay right there, I want to share with you this measuring tape, which runs the entire length of the garden. As I step back, as you can see, it goes all the way down to just about where the wall is. I'm standing right at foot number 20, so right here, if you can take a look, you can see right there, this is 20 feet, and then we go back in this direction, and the parent plant is right here. So you can see that this parent stalk basically runs from this point and runs 20 feet that way, and that's not just where it ends. When we did our video about three to six months ago, I was on that end pulling at another 20 feet off of my neighbor's property where there was passion fruit running in that direction, and I didn't want to result in all of this fruit potentially rotting around me. Fruit that ran into this neighbor's property, fruit that ran up and into those podocarpus trees. As you can see, there's a hedge of trees that are over there, and you can see that the sunlight is just starting to come. As we're on this inclined hill, the sun is finally getting high enough in the sky that these vines are getting some sunlight, and again, you can start seeing some of that new growth on the tips. I'm hoping I can share with you. If I can reach here, you can see that the tree is just starting to come to life in that sun. So this is a great time to be pruning. Another important lesson, and I said this is a great time being the first week of March and as the temperature is warm, and check your growing zone. You can go onto Google and do a search on growing zone and put in your zip code and find out when is that last chance to frost in your area. Make sure you wait another week or two to make sure that there's no cold weather threatening your plants. With this particular passion fruit variety, which is the Fredericks variety, which I've been growing now for about 10 years, I've had some failures as well when it comes to the tree, and the failure being is pruning your passion fruits after harvest, which I know there's some research that says as soon as you harvest your fruit, you can prune your plant, but if you're pruning come winter or fall, and the plant has to struggle to basically, you know, make its resources with its leaves, being in the leaves are those engines that make the sugars and make the proteins and make all of the vitamins and essential nutrients that it needs for survival. If you prune it, and it now has to run through your cold climate of winter and fall without those leaves, I've noticed a lot of passion fruit vines will die back and actually sometimes never even come back. There are some passion fruit vines that die back and will regrow from the roots, but don't give it that extra stress that it otherwise doesn't have to endure by simply pruning your plants after that last chance of frost has passed, which again for us it's been about a month since the last chance of frost has passed our growing zone, which was the end of January, and here we are now that first week of March getting ready to prune, and unfortunately last year I wasn't able to prune the vine, so I had layers of dead vine, which I'm going to share with you right now, underneath layers of new vines that are growing on top of it, and it made it very difficult for those passion fruits to pass. Furthermore, there was a hummingbird nest that was right in this area last year, which I want to share with you as well, so check this out, and that was the main reason why we didn't prune back that passion fruit vine, it was because it nested so close to that heart of the tree area, so I knew it was going to affect the nest as I pruned back, so we decided to just forgo on pruning last year, but check this one out. So here we are now at the very top of the passion fruit vine, this is the parent vine again that we installed about six years ago, we're going to talk about the lifespan of the plant momentarily, but check out all of this new growth, you can see the light's hitting it, the vine is growing, it's pushed out I would say in the last month at least a foot, maybe two feet of growth in just the last 30 days, and let's take a look at what's happening underneath all of this new growth, if we start pulling it back, what I want to share with you is look at all of this dead that's under here, this was last year's vine, and take a look at how it's rotting, and then underneath these branches you'll sometimes find some dead branches too, as again they're competing for light, and what's happening, and take a look in here, you can see there's some passion fruit that couldn't, that didn't make it down to the ground, and some critters came and ate it, and again the system is less than ideal, if we can pull it back a little bit further, I want the camera person to see that what we've used here is a diamond lattice system to basically support the vine, you're going to see it better as we prune the rest of this back, but between this lattice system and then the vines interfering, and then if it fruits up in this area, the fruits just don't make it down, so this system is inferior to just using that simple metal stake system for creating a lattice so that those fruit can suspend and be free, rather than getting trapped in this lattice that just wasn't large enough to allow the fruit to pass, and don't look for something that comes close to allowing the fruit to pass, if you're going to use a lattice, use something large so that as the stems pass over the lattice, there's still enough room for the fruit to pass through, so what we're going to do next is, and what I want to share with you is the importance of pruning it, rather than having another layer, this would, if I left this another year, this would be now three layers of vines, year after year after year, three years of vines resting on top of one another, and adding to mildew, and mold, and rot that actually will interfere with the health and longevity in the life of this vine, which we've so far kept alive for six years, just to let you know when it comes to passion fruit, the average lifetime is somewhere between five and seven, some live as much as ten, others only live two or three, like I told you, there's a lot of passion fruit vines I've grown successfully for a year or two, and then they died only because I pruned it at the wrong time, that's the importance I'm re-emphasizing with this video, to wait until the last chance to frost has passed in your area before pruning those vines, well let's get on to that. I just want to start sharing the initial steps on what I'm looking for as I begin to start the prunes to this passion fruit vine, if you want to come in a little closer, I want to share with you what I'm looking at is, we caught from the bottom that we're dealing with two separate vines that we actually planted within one grow zone, so we've got these two vines, we're going to follow it up, and I'm basically following one of them to find out where it's creating the next vine, and as you can see, here's the vine right there, and what I'm going to do is allow it to continue to fork, I'm going to prune one of the vines here, and I'm going to cut this back so I can see where we made that prune, I'm now going to follow a second one off of the same vine, I can see there's another one that's trailing out, I can see over here, and I'm hoping you can spot this, there's some growth that's here coming out of the leaf, I like that, there's another little bud over here that's growing, another bud that's growing, but what I'm looking for is also that this bud that's growing, they're all attached to the leaf, but let's find the best bud that's growing, and we're going to simply prune it about a quarter of an inch above the bud, and I'm going to show you what I've just detected as well, so I'm going to remove that flower bud from last year, I'm going to remove the vine as well, but if you can come in a little closer, I'm hoping you can see that right in the center of that prune, there's a hollow space right there, right at the tip of my scissors, I'm hoping you can capture that, you see that little hollow spot, come a little closer, so these vines are hollow, and would be a perfect entryway for pests to enter the vine, and possibly colonize within the plant, and also compromise the health of the plant, what we're going to do with that, and other plants of all the trees in my garden, the fig tree has a very hollow, not hollow, very soft pit that can very easily hollow out as well, again, it would be a good idea to protect it, we're going to talk about those products towards the end of this video, because we're going to talk about a few other lessons where the Ivory Organics products can benefit your plants, but we're going to continue this pruning process throughout the entire vine, where I'm looking for a leaf, maybe we'll do one more together real quick, so we're looking at, and we're following the leaves, I'm looking to see where there's some new growth over here, I like this one over here, you can see there's just a little bit of new growth that's coming out of that node, I'm going to remove the vine, I mean that tendril, which is what wraps and secures it, because it was going out in no direction, and then we're just going to prune it about a quarter inch away from that bud, and I'm hoping you can see there's like a little bit of new growth that's coming right out of that bud, there's a nice leaf is going to be the solar panel, which will continue doing its job for probably another month or two, but as a new growth forms, the older leaves from last year will fall, and the cycle will continue, so I'm just going to continue on with that, but I'm going to share with you next while I continue this pruning, I just want to share with you the fruit and how delicious the fruit off of these plants are, and just to remind you that the passion fruit is the essence and the flavor that is basically the concept behind passion fruit, so any of you that have had passion fruit juice, it's derived from and the concept is off the passion fruit fruit, so check this out, my children love it, and it's extremely nutritious and good for you, so consider adding the passion fruit vine to your garden if you've got space for that, so check this one out. On average, a passion fruit vine can grow anywhere from 30 to 60 plus feet in one growing season, and with the fruit that went over our property line, I was able to pull those vines back and collect these fruit, and just one of these at a supermarket, I've seen for as little as three dollars and as much as six dollars, so this is an excellent investment and an excellent fruit to introduce into the home garden as they're beautiful, they're magnificent flowers, and I'm going to share one with you in just a moment, but let's open a couple of these up so you can see the difference between the purple passion, this is of the Frederick variety, which I've been propagating now for about 10 years by cutting and not growing the seeds, the seeds would create something that's completely, I don't want to say completely, they'll still be related, but it'll be genetically different than the parent, it could be better, but the chances are it will not be as delicious, it won't be as productive, it won't be as whatever the variables are, the Frederick variety was selected among hundreds if not thousands of seed as being the preferred superior fruit, and from that, by cloning it, by taking cuttings, by creating air layerings, by, you know, a variety of other methods that can be used, including grafting, by propagating the parent, you're going to create the genetically identical result. Let's open a couple of these up so I can show you the difference between the purple ones and the green ones, so this one here is, you know, one of the ripe ones, here's another ripe one I'm going to open up as well, so you can see what the inside looks like, and now let's open up one of the green ones, this has no hint of purple on it, so if we open this up, it's got some color, which means it's got some sweetness, sometimes I'll open this up, this one here has got like half purple, half green, let's open that up, and again here we got some color, but not quite as much as the purple ones, and now let's try to find even more so, this one here looks a lot darker green, let's see what this looks like on the inside, and this is what I was hoping to get, this one here is pretty white on the inside, this is completely unpalatable, not edible at all, at least not in my taste, and I like sour fruit, so I can even do this green one that's got some color, and when you break up the seeds, and you can kind of crush it with your spoon, the juices come right out, like one of my youngest daughters, she's three, she just enjoys drinking the juice, and the passion fruit is the base, and the basis flavor for fruit punch, a lot of drinks, and it even enhances a lot of other tropical fruits when combined, it's delicious, but obviously the superior flavor is going to be in the purple ones, and here we go, check that out, nothing better, so just want to share with you that even the green ones that we're going to start collecting as we manage the plant, these two will turn purple in a matter of a few days to about a week, so none of these will go to waste, and let's get to pruning, follow me, and I'm hoping you can see how large the vine has gone out of control onto the podocarpus trees that are behind me, and there's still tons of fruit on there, and I see some that are purple as well, we're going to collect those in just a minute, but if you don't manage it, the vine will take over everything in the area, including over here to my left, I've got an apple tree, it's a continual process of pruning, and even over here, I'm going to get my scissors real quick, so I'm just going to take my pruning tool, and all it is is paper scissors, that's all you need to control your passion fruits, you can see that there's a vine here that's working its way into my apple tree, if I allowed this vine to do whatever it wanted all of spring and summer, and here we are now in the middle of September, I've been managing this on a week-to-week basis, keeping the vine away from all of my other fruit trees, desired trees here in my garden, if I allow it, and I know this is going to break some of your hearts, I'm hoping you guys can see this over here, this is another little baby passion fruit, there's another flower that just bloomed, another flower that just bloomed, another flower that just bloomed, there's the potential of another five to six fruit, the value times three or times four or times five, that's $25 worth of fruit right here alone, but what we're going to do is we're going to prune it back, and what I do is I take my pruners and I follow it down to the closest leaf node, and I'm just going to prune it like so, and pull the vine out of the apple tree, and here we go, this now will be recycled into our compost within the garden, I'm going to share that with you before the end of the video. So here we are now, I just want to cut through this so you can see all the layers between the living vine that's on top of all of these dead vines that are below it, and here we're opening it up, you can see the beginning part of the lattice is right there, you can see again, dead vine right in there, you can see this here is a vine that's at least two years old, look at how thick that gets, and you can still see if you come in a little closer, I'm hoping you can capture, you can still see that that center of the vine is still hollow, I guess this is a characteristic of at least the Fredericks variety of passion fruit, but it may be all passion fruit, so you can see it's got a center structure, which again would be an entryway for pests to get in it, we're going to take care of that once we clean this all out, and the cool thing while I was pruning is check this out over here, this here is a hummingbird nest that happened around this time last year, it basically interfered with my timing for pruning and all of a sudden other things happened and we just ended up skipping pruning this passion fruit last year, so it's even that much more important for pruning it this year, but let's continue with cleaning up here. When pruning your vines be also very careful as to where you're pruning, do a careful and thorough examination, this is my disclaimer, my warning to you is here we are that first week of March and a lot of the birds have already started nesting hopefully within your garden, so be very attuned to that, as we said last year we had that hummingbird that was nesting within the passion fruit, we're proud to share with you that there's another hummingbird that's nesting, fortunately not in our passion fruit, so we can prune that this year and instead it's made home behind me in that fuerte avocado tree, check this out, you can see those beaks right there, a pair of hummingbirds, very cute. So here we are now in the understory of the our youngest passion fruit vine, as you can see we've entirely opened that entire canopy that we've created using zip ties and then these metal stakes that again were vinyl wrapped to prevent the overheating of the stakes, let me show you how easy the zip ties work, if I can get my hands on them here, so if you simply take a zip tie you can see, I'll actually even show you what I'm using here, it says 14 inch cable ties, you guys have taught me that the black ones are longer lasting than the clear or the white ones, so I've been now purchasing the black ones instead even though you might find some clear ones like over here, the white ones or the clear ones that are throughout, but let's take a look for example here, a couple of metal stakes and I can show you how easy it is to zip tie these together, so simply let me put these scissors down and we and that'll be secure and we can remove the excess, so as you can see I've left a lot of tips over here, I'd say about 10 tips are existing to recreate the branches that'll then re-cover this entire canopy, recreating a shade in this part of the garden, but most importantly creating the flowers and the fruit, the low-lying fruit that we're going to get to enjoy come summer, fall and believe it or not we enjoyed fruit as late as February this year off of this particular vine, so that'll continue to grow and believe it or not also within the next three to six months this entire area will be covered all over again, let's go check out that parent vine now, follow me. So hopefully you guys have enjoyed when we removed, this here is one of the sucker banana plants to our ice cream or known as a java variety of banana, we just pruned that about less than a month ago and this was a stock of bananas, as you can see there's still one more left here at the bottom right there, but our family got to enjoy and our friends and our family 58 pounds off of this year's harvest, last year we harvested 60 pounds, I'll put the links to these videos towards the end, but this remaining stock from the bunch we're going to recycle on top of take a look at all of those leaves that are underlying it, one of you asked how long is it going to take for all of this to break down and the answer is it depends, as you can see there's still quite a bit of shade here, most of the sun in my garden is to my right or on the north side, this part of the garden the highest parts are getting some sunlight and within the next few weeks I expect a lot more light coming into this lower canopy area and we can expect that this will break down as the light and as the temperatures warm up, so depending on where you are if you've got a warmer growing zone closer to the tropics, this will break down probably within 30 to 60 days, for me probably it'll be closer to about 90 to 100 days and again this is going to break down and recycle, another one of you also asked what are you going to do about the pups that are existing underneath it, I left two to three pups to create the next generation so we can enjoy year after year of bananas and I'll share with you where one of these pups are, you can see over here is one of the pups underlying all of these leaves, all the leaves from that parent banana and even the trunk got recycled around the base of the crown of this particular banana plant, but as you can see this here is one of the suckers, there's a couple other ones and these suckers are extremely vigorous, they'll work their way through and even if they don't the plant will create some more come spring and summer, so we've got that, let's continue as you can see with the parent plant I've now removed the entire vine structure behind me, so when I said I'm going to put 90% you can see that that's 90% of the plant, most of it I've got now in a compost pile on another side of my garden, but all of the material that's left such as these and I'm going to share with you another pile that we're going to create in just a minute, but all of this, check this out here we go and even the bird's nest, but all of this including the hummingbird's bird nest from last year is all going to get recycled back into the garden, so with all of the passion fruit vines that we've got remaining from our prune project we're going to simply recycle into these piles that we've got between each of the fruit trees within the entire garden and what's going to happen is as these organic matter breaks down it's going to further enrich the garden soil, it's going to feed the earthworms, it's going to feed the beneficial bacteria, it's going to feed the beneficial nematodes and it's going to ultimately result in more elements and more matter getting into your surrounding plants. I mean these were the ingredients that created life to begin with and these are the ingredients that's going to further support and encourage maximum flowering, maximum fruiting and maximum growth within your garden. So as we're pruning I'm being more careful as I get closer to the heart of the tree, again I use the heart as being the primary trunk or the primary vine in this example and then the main branches that are coming off of it that are going to recreate this entire trellis by spring, I'd say we're already very close to spring but I'd say by mid-spring and going into early summer. So what I'm doing with this is I'm simply just pruning it back again I'm going about a quarter inch away from each of the leaves and it'll continue to bud and recreate the vine off of my most recent cut. What I'm doing is also removing as much deadwood as I can as you can see there's a lot of vines from last year that were underneath the new growth from this year and we're recycling all of that but I'm also being careful not to do too much when it comes to detail in this zone which is close to the heart of the plant. What I'm going to do is now watch it over the next two to four weeks, watch that new growth and then I'll reconfigure the new growth and remove some of the more underlying dead growth or even if there's some green underneath I'll be more selective in regards to what's good and what's bad after I watch it grow. So there's again a little bit of a mess between what's new and what's old in this area but I'm going to leave that be. What I'm going to do next and what I want to share with you is a lot of you guys are pruning it the vine that's behind you if you can turn the camera you can see is now in full sun. Fortunately there's a lot of leaves that are shading the canopy and the underlying trunk if we can call it the trunk being the lower part of the plant but in this area you can see that we're still in the shade but I'm going to teach you guys a lesson when it comes to if this trunk were now exposed and within another like I said within a couple more weeks there's going to be a lot more light entering this area all of this is now exposed until the vine grows and kind of covers. I usually allow a couple of vines to protect the heart of the plant but until that happens we're going to coat the plant now with this product called the Ivory Organics and let me share with you these products over here real quick. If we take a look here I've got just the yellow products there's also the blue whitewash formula which are oil-free but if you come in a little closer you can see this here is the Ivory Organics 3-in-1. The white one is registered material for use in organic agriculture. The oils that are in here are what's going to be beneficial on all of those exposed wood where we sell those holes in the vines. Castor oil, cinnamon oil, clove oil, garlic, peppermint, rosemary, and spearmint these are going to help basically repel and keep pests out so any of those exposed tips we're going to coat with the Ivory Organics. What we're also going to do is we're going to coat the tree trunk as well. I typically use the white formula but in this demonstration I'm going to use the brown which I've already got one that's already ready mixed and we'll do another one that's also green which we'll do together in just a second and then for your harder to do areas such as let's say this vine that's here in front of me if we come back these leaves that are in this area are going to fall off within the upcoming month or two as the plant pushes out the new growth last year's leaves are going to fall and it's going to create this exposed trunk and as you can see we coated this area I guess for another demonstration that we did last year but you can see that protecting the trunk will prevent sunburn on the plant but if it's harder to reach areas you can also use this ready-to-use spray and this here is already done for you then you can simply just spray it and you can see this light white film that's being created on the plant you can even spray the leaves and what it's going to do is create a much cooler plant I'm hoping you can capture some of the light white film that is going to now repel some of that excess sun it's going to create a cooler plant it does offer some protection during the winter as well some people have been successful in growing things that are outside their growing zone because of the concept of whitewashing and whitewashing with ivory organics products the concept of whitewashing is typically done using paint latex paint but the big negative when it comes to using paint on your plants is that paint is designed to last for decades so as the plant's bark replaces and changes itself our skin does so every 30 to 60 days when it comes to the bark of your plant and your trees that could be once every year or two for example over here to my right I've got my Oro Blanco grapefruit that's coated with the ivory organics color white but you can imagine if every year or two it's changing its bark then all of that paint if I was using latex paint would end up in the soils so let's get to now coating the trunk of the vine for the parent passion fruit let's get started so this here is the ivory organics color brown as you can see it creates a very natural looking tone but now let's go to creating the ivory organics color green which I'll do for the upper half but when protecting your vine you're going to want to go all the way down to the ground level so you're going to work your way all the way down and now I'm going to create a new batch of the ivory organics color green we can do that together if you want to come in a little closer as you can see here it says protects newly installed plants and trees shields prune and damaged surfaces and we're going to be using it for that purpose as well of pruning those exposed areas on the vine when you open the product it's going to come with the organic base powder if you take a look at the ingredients of the inert ingredients that includes the iron oxide that controls the color limestone mica milk and silica and then all of those natural seven oils and get this bubble wrapped oil out and what we're going to do is simply add the base powder to the can and then we'll add some water about halfway up we'll begin to mix and then we're simply going to take the oil out of this bubble wrap and this again has the seven oils in it and then we'll add it then we can add some more water now we've got a full can of the ivory organics brush on solution and keep in mind that it's not the only way the product can be used when you've got the can take a look at the back it gives you the brush on direction which is filling up the can with water as we just did you can also use it as a foliar spray by adding one or two teaspoons let's actually read it says one or two teaspoons per gallon of water or you can also use it as a tree paste by adding one fourth cup of water to the can you'll have about a third of a can of tree paste that way as well let's continue mixing this and now let's apply it to the tree so you can see the difference so right there is the line where it's brown and now you can see the difference between the brown and the green so you can see that the green looks very natural as well depending on what your use is in the application and what your choices are you've got the choice of the green the brown as well as the white a lot of you also ask the question of which one's better if your goal is to use the product as a brush on as well as a foliar spray i prefer the white being it has the maximum reflective properties but even if you go with the brown and green by wearing any color shirt i would say aside from black where black absorbs the most amount of heat but regardless of your color or shirt you're going to end up with protection as it's going to prevent too much sun from burning and harming the underlying trunk the other thing i wanted to make my point on as well is when it comes to the stem if i can share with you a stem that was recently pruned and see over here the tip is hollow right there on the tip of my finger so we can now go with the ivory organics and simply brush that and seal it the better way to accomplish the same is probably use it as a tree paste so have something the consistency of toothpaste and then you can just brush that on with the tip of your finger and apply it that way on those remaining tips which should probably be about 10 to 15 not too much trouble there let's continue let me make a couple other quick points now by by coating these exposed surfaces you're going to be preventing the entryway of potential pests and disease within those stems and the preferred way probably for doing this particular step would be to use the product as a tree paste where you'll have something more again the consistency of toothpaste where you can just simply apply it with the tip of your fingers and just rubbing on that paste product on the tips again just to keep and ensure that those tips remain sealed and disease free let's continue with just one other point i want to make before we conclude follow me so my wife was asking me why do we need so many passion fruits throughout the garden if you've got one and it's productive why do we need two and she probably is not aware of the fact that we've got number three and number four behind me as well which i've been propagating and making sure that we've got future generations i said this at the beginning i'm going to say it again the passion fruit on average only has a life of six to ten years but for you that might only be that might be three commercial growers on average only keep their passion fruits for only three years so and then they repeat the process so that they don't end up with staggered dead passion fruits between their living passion fruits so they just simply put in new passion fruits every three years so it's important that with the cuttings that you've created from all of the pruning that you've done to your passion fruit is to simply create new cuttings of plants and i'm going to go through the step-by-steps in videos that we've done in the past i'll put those links towards the end and i'll put them down below in the comments below so that you can see the steps on propagating your heirloom propagating your passion fruits by way of cuttings another important way to also propagate your passion fruits is by way of air layer as well so consider air layering your passion fruits and i'll be sharing a lot more tips in future videos to come as well if you so if you've enjoyed this educational moment by iver organics be sure to like us and most importantly by subscribing below you'll be connected to this and all of our other educational gardening videos thanks again for watching and happy gardening