Gold Medal for our variety introduction Passiflora Cooltropics® Snowstar®

The ‘Innovert Competition’ is held in France every year. This is where companies present their best new variety introductions in horticulture. Together with our French partner, Travers Nurseries, we submitted the white-flowering passionflower Cooltropics® Snowstar® this year. The variety comes from our own breeding programme for hardy passion fruit and was launched on the market this year.

We were delighted when the winners were announced and Snowstar® stood at the top of the podium and won...

Where will the Passiflora range be in five years

Winter hardy passion fruit is a novelty on the market for edible fruit plants. Thanks to Lubera's own breeding programme, Lubera Edibles is definitely a pioneer in this field.

The passion fruit range at Lubera Edibles currently consists of two varieties: Cooltropics® Eia Popeia® and Cooltropics® Snowstar®. There is strong demand for both varieties and the Snowstar® variety was awarded the gold medal for Best New Plant at the French Innovert competition in spring 2024. However...

How do you produce hardy Cooltropics® passion fruit plants for retail sale?

The Passiflora incarnata hybrids in the Cooltropics® series ('Eia Popeia' and 'Snowstar') are easy to cultivate and can be sold in different sizes. In fact, the climbing plants are very easy to care for and quite robust. With appropriate fertilization and watering, they grow quickly and quickly present their full splendour.

Current breeding projects in Buchs - impressions of a photographer

How can you, I thought. But Markus " Merciless" Kobelt didn't let up: Yes, exactly, to invest 1-2 days with a photo shoot in the hottest August of all times (?) on the current breeding fields in Buchs, that was his latest job to me. Now I do like to take photos. But I prefer slightly overcast skies - of course just so that the photos turn out as good as possible, certainly not because of me... But what did I notice during the photo safari, armed with the camera and with the eyes of...

Hardy Cooltropics® passion fruit: a new fruit variety and climber for the garden

Newly available from Lubera Edibles are two hardy passion fruits: Cooltropics® Eia Popeia® and Cooltropic® Snowstar®. In the next few years, the Cooltropics® series will be expanded with many new varieties from the Lubera breeding programme. This is reason enough to ask Lubera breeder, Raphael Maier, for a presentation and classification of the new fruit variety for the northern garden. How exactly do hardy passion fruits work, how can they be produced and propagated and when is the ideal time...

News from Lubera® breeding - passion flowers, fire beans and co.

Summer is the time to take a well-deserved rest and enjoy your garden. Unfortunately, this is only partly the case for Lubera®. Although we are incredibly happy about everything that grows and thrives, there is a lot of work to do right now. But in the process we have discovered many exciting new things. So come along and catch a glimpse of the exciting breeding news and what you might be lucky enough to grow in your own garden in the next few years.

Breeding hardy passion fruit

Have you ever heard of hardy passion fruit? Probably not. When you think of passion fruit, you tend to think of truly tropical fruits from South America. And that is true. The passion fruits of the species Passiflora edulis available in supermarkets are tropical plants, just like the majority of the more than 600 species of the genus Passiflora.

The plants of the genus Passiflora are also called passion flowers and over 100 species of them produce edible fruits. These fruits are very different...