Hi CO...and welcome out of the shadows of "lurkerdom" and into the light of "posterdom." While I have never personally "pugged" a naranjilla, as far as I know it will respond like most other plants that you perform this on. The only plant/tree that you can't "pug" that I know of is a palm. Yes, you will lose some blooming/fruting....but that will be temporary. Keep us posted on how it does once you do the dirty deed. Sounds like you have to do it or change your growing area. BTW, where in CO are you? I used to correspond with a tropical fruit grower out in Delta. I think that is is western CO. Anyway, best of luck with your pruning and post pruning plant recovery.

Harry

Yo CoPlantNut - I don't known if you could call it "pugging" but I have just wacked them back and dug them up and crammed them into pots and placed them in the hoophouse for the winter. Lots of happy blooming going on now. In the fall, before the first frost happened I chopped off all the fruiting branches and put them in the basement. It took a few months but the fruit finally ripened (they might have ripened sooner if I had them somewhere with more light, but with all those thorns I needed them out of the way).

It seems that once you get them blooming you can easily keep them blooming. They seem to bloom better when the stems are woody. The fruit takes a long time to ripen and when it does it isn't as full flavored nor as big as the fruit down in Colombia.

In my experience the ornamental plant known as 'bed of nails' has poor quality fruit. It tastes like uncooked yellow squash. Whereas true 'Lulo' or'Naranjilla' tastes like tangerines or kumquats and is much larger. I think a lot of people are selling seeds of 'bed of nails' as 'naranjilla'. You won't know until the fruit ripens, the plants look the same.

Harry, thanks for the welcome; I figured it would probably work just fine given that I wack back related plants (tomatoes, peppers) the same way when they get too tall.

I'm just north of Denver, in Longmont; over on the western side of the state around Delta is the main fruit-growing area of Colorado.

It is easier to keep the plants short than to change my growing setup, and if I ever want to be able to put them back outside for the summer, they need to be compact, sturdy plants to put up with the high winds we often get. Naranjilla's large leaves make this an extra challenge, but they seemed to do OK in very sheltered spots last summer, despite occasional 80 MPH winds.

John, I have a spineless form of Naranjilla, which was offered by Logee's last spring. This year they have a different species available.

I kept my plants potted (7 gallon "smart pots") as I knew I would have to haul them back inside. They certainly seem anxious to resume blooming now that they have adequate light again; maybe I can finally taste some fruit this summer!

I've never tasted a Naranjilla before, so I can't complain about them not being as good as in Columbia. I've read that the best ones in Columbia are from the higher elevations; thin air is one thing I can replicate for them in Colorado with no effort.

I'll try to chop them down today and see if I can get a more compact plant. I took a few pictures

Here is a link that might be useful: Pictures

The problem with a lot of the fruiting plants from the northern part of South America is that they don't have seasonal shifts in day length. It's pretty much 12 hours on and 12 hours off every day of the year. I've tried lots of fruit seeds from my local hispanic market and I can get them to grow but they tend to freak out in the middle of summer. Normal blooming and fruiting happens in spring and fall when the day length is more like what they are used to.

The region I saw them being grown in (in Colombia) was high elevation but still not frosty. Around 7,500 feet, nights in the high 40's and days in the high 70's. The only seasonal change was between rainy and dry. You see them in every home's garden but people usually buy them since they are cheap in the market.

I have better luck growing them in part sun or half day sun in the summer - other wise treat them like a tomato or eggplant.

There has got to be a way to encourage fruit ripening in the fall - maybe snipping off the tips of all the branches and removing all new flowers so that the plant focuses its energy on the fruit that has already formed.

If your spineless form develops pear shaped yellow fruit with just a hint of fuzz it is more than likely a fruit called 'cocona' and is usually grown in the shade at lower elevations. If they are orange and fuzzy with coarse hair they are naranjilla. If they are huge and orange and fuzzy they are lulo. I believe all of them are Solanum quitoense, though some taxonomists want to break off lulo and cocona into separate species.

Yes, my experience so far was that the plants grew well over the summer, looking a little heat-stressed above 95 degrees, but didn't produce any inflorescence until late August. A flurry of blooming happened when they had conditions as you describe- 40-50 at night and 70-80 during the day.

They stopped forming new blooms while they were being tortured in my living room, but within 3 weeks of being put in a controlled environment of 65-degree lows and 88 degree highs, 15 hours of light per day, they started forming blooms again:

But then today I turned them from this:

to this:

sparing the lone, 1/2" fruit that remains from September:

We'll see how long the stumps take to recover!