The summer rain has been playing havoc for passionfruit grower Tom Carey, now two months into harvest on his farm at The Channon in northern New South Wales.
So far the crop has proven fruitful with good numbers and great colour, but the continuous rain has been leaving its mark.
"It's really tricky to control disease in this wet weather, it's hard to get on the paddock with a tractor," Mr Carey of Terania Creek Passionfruit said.
"We've still been getting these days where you get 10 millimetres of rain, just in little outbursts, and you think the ground's just dry enough to get onto and you have half an inch [rain] and then you've got to wait for another day.
Since starting harvest a month early, Terania Creek Passionfruit has picked more than 200 cartons a week.
"We started picking in late November while we were still planting the spring vines, which is always tricky because you've got to be up doing both early in the morning, so you've got two crews on," he said.
"The fruit drops when it's ripe so we have to pick it off the ground, and every day we come through and the fruit that's on the ground is what we pick."
While the rain can disrupt pollination, Mr Carey said the passionfruit flowering this season has been strong.
"When the sun does come out the bees go nuts, they're working really hard, but continual wet days we've had a lot of."
Hey sweetheart, let's tango
The region — both its climate and consumers — favours the purple-skinned varieties over the larger red or yellow-skinned panamas.
Mr Carey has just started growing flamencos in addition to the Tweed tango, but his main crop is the sweetheart, which he described as the "mainstay" of the industry.
"The passionfruit varieties tend to run out of steam a bit because they're propagated so often, the DNA material tends to reduce in quality so the actual vines run out of vigour to a degree and the fruit get smaller and are more disease prone.
"So the breeding program for passionfruit is ongoing, but the sweethearts have really hung in there for a long time."
While the annual harvest extends nine to 10 months, summer is the busiest period of the year for growers.
"It's picking, it's packing fruit, it's moving it through the shed and getting it away and seeing what you have time for at the end of the day," he said.
A little passion goes a long way
While the passionfruit farmer said he's a price-taker at the Sydney markets, but at the local farmers' market he sets the price.
"We do the farmers markets which are great because the fruit goes down to all our local customers, the fruit is picked a day or two days before they're eating it or buying it, which is fantastic," he said.
In the Carey household, if there's vanilla ice cream going about after dinner, there's always passionfruit on it.
"I don't tend to eat so much inside because I'm tasting them in the paddock a lot, but they're great in yoghurt and they are great on vanilla ice cream," he said.
