SA breeder’s new cultivar sparks fresh love for passion fruit

There can be few fruit cultivars whose origins are as unusual as that of the new passion fruit variety, Silesia.

When drought struck North West in the mid-2010s, game breeder Darryn Stoltz, who farmed in the province, began to look for a nutritious source of food for his herds. He was advised to plant passion fruit, as the sweet pulp was said to satisfy the animals.

Unhappy with the low yield and pulp content of the two commercially planted varieties, Ester and Edulis, Stoltz began breeding for a new, juicier variety of passion fruit, using his knowledge of crossbreeding. In 2017, after two years of trial and error, he ended up producing Silesia, a cultivar that was nearly double the size of the conventional passion fruit, sweeter and faster-growing.

While Stoltz was pleased with the result, his game were less than impressed, leaving him with a harvest and no takers. Rather than waste the produce, he set off for the