Hi Jackie,
Were in the same boat,I have about 9 fruits,golfball size and smaller, oval like in shape ,even though they were soft,they never changed in color.I just now cut open the biggest and softess 3,and to my surprise ,looks like what might be nice size brown ripe seeds.
Only othe passie in bloom at that time was morifola,and constance elliott and maybe caerula.
Like you I tried many,many tines to hand pollinate them,and nothing,all july and august,so I just gave up,only way I discovered these,I was cutting the vines down,even though they were still green,the frost would stop any further flowering,and I wanted to dig the plants up before a hard freeze,they are now potted up in the greenhouse.

Wow, I've never seen that many seeds in Incense fruits. Mine set 21 fruit this year, but none had more than 3 mature seeds. A few had 10-12 large seeds that had the potential to be good, but did not ripen before the vine froze :(. I think I got a total of maybe 15 dark seeds.

I tried over 200 hand pollinations with incarnata pollen, and not one of them worked. All the fruit set after I gave up and had the pasture mowed, along with 99.9% of the maypops.

I agree kiwinut--those fruit look plump enough to come from a maypop. Go figure!

My one lonely fruit is still hanging in there. The temperature is supposed to drop down to the upper 30s tonight, which is the coldest it's gotten thus far this year. Last year my Incense never died back all the way, despite several light freezes--I found caterpillars still eating on it in February! I doubt a fruit would survive even those light freezes though, so I'm pretty much holding my breath to see if it ripens before our first real freeze.

The fruit on Incense here were not bothered by temps in the upper 20's, but they were damaged some at 25. At 23, the whole vine was hurt pretty bad.

On another note, I never saw a single caterpillar this season. The year before, there were many. With the really mild winter, I was surprised that I did not see them again.

My Incense set a second fruit, but the cats got to it. Oh well. The original fruit is still hanging in there, but it's going to be a small one. Maybe 1.5 inches across. Never did find the pollinator, so if there are any viable seed I'll definitely be planting them.

The last round of fruit set on my incarnata vines started dropping this weekend. I've got three big fruit the size of goose eggs with another 8-10 still on the vine. One fruit also stayed small, maybe an inch in diameter, and I suspect it got pollinated by my caerulea.

Well, the cats girdled the vine my one fruit was on before it could mature. I set the fruit aside for a week or so, on the off-chance it might ripen a bit more. Then I cut it open. Inside I found a single immature seed.

But what's this? In the Indian hawthorn bushes adjacent to my Incense, I found a stray vine--stripped of leaves by the caterpillars, but still boasting one fat, healthy fruit. That makes *three* fruit the Incense set this year, all via insect pollination. My 50-plus attempts at hand pollination literally bore no fruit.

Let's see if this one makes it to maturity--we've had three light freezes thus far and the Incense is a little ragged, but still holding up well. The past week's been warm, so there is some new growth here and there (which the remaining cats are happy to munch on).

We've had a series of light freezes this week (even tho temps are reaching mid- to upper-60s during the day) and progressive layers of the Incense are being killed off (it was a BIG plant). Lo and behold, this morning a bunch more leaves dropped to reveal another fruit. So that makes at least five fruit the plant set on its own--of which two have now survived close to two months.

The fruit are on the smallish side but still plump and firm, so the vine continues to nourish them. They're still firmly attached with no signs of dropping, so I'm content to let them sit there as long as they want.

I wonder if the next freeze will reveal any more hiding amidst the leaves?