Did you know it takes 90 days for a passionfruit vine to grow a ripened fruit, between 16 to 18 days for the gestation of a possum, and, comparatively, 23 days for rats?
I’m highlighting these fun facts because I deeply admire the abundant passionfruit vine out the front of our house, with its trunk as large as my husband’s bicep. Last season, it bore enough fruit to feed the small village of Sydney Street north.
I had heard that passionfruit vines attract possums to their leaves, and that wasn’t the case for the first couple of years until I naively planted some geraniums in flower boxes near them. Then, I had one possum, then more possums and many rats. Their nocturnal shenanigans would wake me every night, and their festivities and appetites grew. But it was when they started eating our fiddle leaf figs on my balcony that I felt myself figuratively strap on my gun belt and walk down the dusty alley, ready to duel.
I purchased a product marketed as a non-harmful possum deterrent: a chilli and garlic spray that you spray onto the plant. It became an expensive salad dressing for the marsupial.
I researched traps and decided this was not an option. Relocating a possum to a new territory is illegal, and it will not survive the move.
I asked the horticulturalists in Brisbane’s Facebook gardening groups for an answer, and two intriguing suggestions, one unorthodox, came forward. Firstly, hose off any of their droppings, then use blood and bone fertiliser on the site where they frequent… and collect human urine to douse the area.
I will neither confirm nor deny which of these suggestions we attempted, but I will happily share that we no longer have a possum visiting—nor anyone else, for that matter.
