I have a seedling that I consider very good, so good that when it had to move I tried my best to save it for another location. So far, so good. It's very late and has fruit pulp which is more transparent than many and does not brown when cut open. So don't discount seedlings. The fruit may not be as large as some of the named cultivars, but size is not everything :-) You can train a feijoa to be a tree or keep as a multi-trunk "shrub". Your choice, although some seem to have their own idea of how to grow. As for pollination, many are at least partly self-fruitful but pollen is not very mobile so the wind is not much help and bees are not much interested in the flowers, although I have seen them visit them when a small tree was parked next to a field of wild flowers in bloom. For years my seedling bloomed but never gave me fruit. Then I found the video linked below. It made me laugh, but I tried it and voila! Now I do the pollinating every year, just to be sure. Here is a link that might be useful: Hand-pollinating feijoa with the paintbrush

Thanks for all the quick responses... larry gene, your advice is very helpful. I think I can rule out the temperature thing, as the room has remained in the 70's and 80's during this period, but I will pay attention to other factors. The blossoms do show a small amount of thickening at the base before they fall off, at least compared to the newly opened ones. I probably will end up finding room (and money) for another potted feijoa of a different variety for pollination, but I should also mention that I'm still keeping my fingers crossed. The plant has not completely finished blooming so there is still some hope, it just wouldn't be the kind of fruit set that I had imagined with all those flowers. Fruitgirl and Mark4321: I have to confess that while the feijoa did have a "Nazemetz" tag on it, the passionfruit did not have a name tag. I have assumed "Frederick" because I had bought one of these from the same place for my brother (he said he got a few fruits the first summer outside in SoCal) and it seems to be the most common type for sale in Southern California. It sounds like the passionfruit pollination is very complicated, so I think what I will do at this point is try growing a plant from grocery store fruit seed. If my original plant sets fruit in the meantime, great, but if not, perhaps it's not a Frederick, and maybe it will cross with the seedling. How does this sound? Thanks again...

Eric - you've seen my yard. I showed you my row of Feijoas that I grew from seed. I don't think I showed you one plant that I bought at a plant sale, sold as a blooming ornamental. It's up in the flowerbed by the house. It wasn't a named variety but it was labeled as a blooming plant and had a company name on the tag (long lost). The seed came from a tree at the arboretum that fruits almost every year, is huge and the fruit are the size of a chicken egg. I do not remember the fruit being extra tasty but I don't think they were completely ripe. Of the nine seedlings in the garden, they give three types of fruit; some of them are very round, some of them are egg shaped and large, and some of them are small and hard. None of them have much flavor. And I have to hand pollinate in order to get fruit. But the tree up in the flowerbed fruits every year with half sized fruit, lots of them, no hand pollination required, and they are delicious. I'm tempted to try to graft some of its branches on to my row of loosers down in the garden. I love the look of Feijoa bushes/trees, but for the amount of space they take up and the hassle of hand pollinating, I think mine are gonna be moved off to the side and something better moved into their spot. I have no idea what that might be. Oh, and the hardy kiwis had their first (light) crop this fall. I do not regret planting them! so much better than store bought.

Well, in theory just pick the straightest, healthiest stem and cut all the rest as close to the ground as you can. In practice: -don't cut more than a third of the stems in any one year, or the plant will suffer. So it will take a few years to achieve this. -you'll need to cut the unwanted stems a little above the soil level, to prevent pathogens from entering at the wound. No, that wound paint stuff won't help. -if you notice any new shoots suckering up from the base, remove them immediately. -you can see the base of your tree will probably not be as attractive as it would be if you had done this earlier, so you might need to underplant it to hide this. -once you've cut back all the other stems and you're down to one, give it a full year to recover and then "limb it up," meaning remove the branches on the lower third of the main stem. Keep in mind that if you train the plant as a tree it will grow taller than it would have if you'd left it as a shrub!