Fruits Of My Labours

Day 250: Well, I'll be darned! It looks like my attempt to pollinate the Akebia vines is going to pay off! Little 3/4" fruits are developing on the purple vine.

Using a fine artist's paintbrush, I transferred pollen from the male flowers of the white vine to the female flowers of the purple vine. I would have liked to perform a reverse experiment as well, but the male flowers of the purple vine never formed pollen, a fact which led to misgivings that it might have been a non-fertile cultivar. Both male and female flowers were smaller on the purple vine than on the white, although the purple females appeared to be receptive (i.e., the pistils were tipped with stigmatic fluid). The female flowers on the white vine were not observed to demonstrate receptivity, "not observed" because I didn't look very hard at them because I didn't have any pollen to transfer to them. The fruits are developing solely from the ovaries which were hand-pollinated; all others have dropped.

A question now arises: did the cold snap we experienced just as the male flowers opened on the (obviously fertile) purple vine inhibit their ability to produce pollen? They opened a week or so later than the white flowers. Interestingly, the white vine produced very few female flowers, but even so, no pollen was produced by the purple vine with which to cross-pollinate them. And then there's another question: are the fruits going to taste good enough to be worth the bother of hand-pollination? Will they even hang on the vine long enough to mature? Stay tuned!