Let’s face it, gardening can sometimes have its disappointments.

A case in point here is passionfruit. There was a healthy vine here when we arrived more than 12 years ago, but it produced no fruit.

I was given an excellent, promising Nelly Kelly plant by a friend a couple of years ago. It obviously didn’t like it here and soon died, despite my best efforts in petting and pampering of it.

This year a plant grew unbidden. Its vine grew enthusiastically and flowered prolifically. I counted the budding fruit every day, anticipating a large harvest.

And then … the fruit turned out to be orange skinned with the flesh inside tasteless. WHAT a disappointment!

The story does have a happier ending though. The wonderful things about preservers and more successful gardeners is that they share their excess precious produce.

This was the case a couple of days ago when a friend gifted me some beautiful passionfruit.

What a treat! I used some to flavour the marshmallow for snowballs. The flavour was exquisite! (In the photo of them, some were flavoured with mulberry.)

Today I made a small batch of passionfruit curd and froze the remaining pulp in small containers.

Don’t know about anyone else but I think passionfruit has one of the best flavours known to man.

Flavours of snowballs pictured above are vanilla, mulberry and passionfruit.