I'm sure you can grow them. Guava trees are easy to find here, but if you look for a passion vine, make sure to get one that makes fruit, as some are grown only for flowers. Passion vines tend to take over large spaces, however, and the one I had in Venice took over one whole wall of my back yard, but I would get at least 60 passion fruit a day, and so I had to buy a juicer to extract juice from them, which I could then freeze or make into sorbet. Possums also like passion fruit, and so there is also that to deal with, plus the vines are messy, and it is necessary to remove dead leaves and branches on a regular basis. Guava is just a tree and takes up much less space.

Fresh passion juice is fantastic, however, and worth the effort. Even the sorbet that I made retained the fragrance of the flowers and fruit and is unlike anything you can buy. The passion fruit jam that I bought is nothing like that and is almost flavorless. It takes a bit like apricot preserves, and I am not fond of apricots. However, I think I can use it in place of apricot preserves to make a glaze for fruit, especially on lemon curd tarts. It will not need any straining.

I've never had guava or passionfruit in any way except canned juices, they definitely do not grow here. However, for some reason canned guava juice and canned mango juice are both very popular and easy to find, passionfruit not as much, and usually mixed with other things.

I love international grocery stores and often buy things that I am not familiar with and have to go home and look them up on the internet! That's how I found out that I love dragonfruit. (grin)

Your Brazilian grocery trip sounds interesting and fun. Portuguese is much like Spanish, according to my foreign exchange student. She did teach me how to say "pony tail", but I've forgotten.

Annie

The woman at the store said I should be fine only speaking Spanish, as she said most Brazilian will understand Spanish, but they will not understand English.

I also grow dragonfruit, but I only got one fruit last year because I have to hand-pollinate the flowers right when they open at 10:00PM; by morning it is too late. I had several flowers but only caught one open in the evening so that I could pollinate it. My orchid cactus make similar fruit, and they get pollinated by insects, as the flowers stay open for several days, but the fruit they make is very small. They are blooming right now.

I also love market trips like this and all the neat things I can buy to try!

Lars, I'm always amazed by the things you can grow! things we never even see here. lol! For easier pollination, maybe you can simulate the darkness req'd for your flowers to open? (assuming they don't wear a watch. ;^)

The most common use for guava paste is with cheese, but here's some others:

10 Ways to use Guava Paste, by Joanna Miller

http://www.thekitchn.com/guava-paste-111622

That's very similar to these recipes that I found. No one seems to mention using it in smoothies, but I still think it is a good idea. I also think it would be good in a turnover, and I might make some of those next week-end.

PM, my favorite fruit that I grow is cherimoya, which is fairly expensive in the farmers' markets here, where I find it more often than in stores. It is similar to guanabana, one of my favorite fruits, which I cannot grow. I bought guanabana juice at the Brazilian market, but I can find it now at any store. In the 1970s I bought it a lot in Mexico, before I could find it here. For ice cream, I like cherimoya even more than guanabana. I also have to hand pollinate the cherimoya, which is tricky because the flowers are hermaphroditic - they start out female and then switch to male when they open fully. To pollinate them, I have to find both male and female flowers at the same time and transfer pollen using a tiny (000) paint brush. The good thing is that the cherimoya tree makes hundreds of flowers each year, and the season lasts for a couple of months or so. The season for dragonfruit (pitaya) is very short, and I had my pitaya plant for five years before I got any flowers at all.

One good thing is that I can pollinate a flower with its own pollen. For the epidendrum, it is necessary to have pollen from a different plant, I think. At least I never got fruit from them until I had multiple plants close together.

Lovely!

Dragonfruit tastes like soap to me (is it like cilantro that way?), but it's SO pretty!
I'll keep the passion and guava in mind for next time we change the garden. And I already have the juicer. :)

I never thought about what to do with guava paste, other than not buy it so I won't eat it all up out of the container and get stuck in the door like Winnie the Pooh. I just put it in stuff. ;) It's absolutely delicious (though decadently sweet) on toast.

My dragonfruit does not taste like soap, unless you have more delicious soap than I do. I do chill it before I eat it, however, and it has a very fragrant, refreshing flavor. To me, it tastes a bit like flowers, much like fresh passion fruit tastes like flowers.

I do get the "cilantro tastes like soap" - but that does not apply to dragon fruit that I have eaten.

I didn't think dragonfruit tasted like soap either, so that makes me happy, although I've only eaten it half a dozen times, so that's probably not enough to know if it's a variety or stage of ripeness or just different tastes for different people.

Lars, that flower is beautiful. Like you, Ashley loves guanabana, but I've only seen it here as juice. I do buy it when I see it, as she loves the stuff, but I have to go to Grand Rapids to the import markets to find it.

Annie

So, I googled to see if it was just me, and found a lot of posts about dragon fruit tasting like nothing or sweet nothing, and a few that also said soap. These included white and purple fleshed, and right from the bush to shipped ten thousand miles. Then I realized that my glycerine hand soaps are sweet and flowery smelling and the rest of the soaps in the house are unscented, though I'd thought that dragon fruit reminded me more of Ivory. These things all make each other fire in the brain processing, however.

OTOH, cilantro doesn't remind me of soap. I grew up eating Mexican food, so it just tastes like cilantro to me. I'd rather not have it, because I don't like it, but I don't get the ewww soap reaction. :)

No matter. Your plant is gorgeous, Lars, and it only matters that you like the fruit. :)