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My Kiwai is fruiting!!!

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If like me, you’ve struggled to grow kiwi fruit for years without success, take heart. Here is a variety that seems to succeed fairly easily. It’s only coming into its third summer after planting (Spring 2008). The picture is of its flowers a few weeks ago, but now there are lots of tiny green fruit. I hope some of them at least will last and mature into edible fruit.

Most of the fruit fell off very early on and I began to worry if they had been pollinated. A few weeks later I found ONE fruit was still there and it stayed there until October when I found it had fallen off, but was ripe. VERY small fruit less than a pea in size, a bit disappointing.
The vine has made a great deal of growth this season, though I don’t think my layered shoots have taken. I’m going to leave them over winter and hope they may have rooted by the spring.

Maybe I will get some acceptable fruit next year.

I’ve tried ordinary kiwis, so-called self-fertile ones, male and female, kiwis grown from supermarket seed etc etc. for years. All I ever got was a huge plant that went everywhere. I tried pruning rigidly, nary a flower, except once in a greenhouse when all the flowers promptly fell off.
I know the kiwai is not as large, but at least it flowers at a time when they aren’t going to get frosted, and you are supposed to be able to eat the whole fruit, including the skin.
I got my plant from Graines Baumaux in France but they must be more widely available.
I’m currently ‘layering’ a shoot to make another plant, as my attempts at ordinary cuttings in spring and autumn failed.

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Comments

 

I'm jealous, I've had one for 7 years, never had a flower, but you can't expect much living in Rotherham I suppose!!! Well done Bertie!

17 Jun, 2010

 

Mines fruiting here too in Monmouthshire : )

17 Jun, 2010

 

Congratulations! Kiwi vines don't like frost, although my father, in NZ, had kiwis growing in the back yard in a part of the country that does have frosts, but not really hard ones, and they fruited. So, they can be grown in a UK climate, but they do prefer a really sunny climate, and a lack of hard winters, which is why, in NZ, they're grown in places like Opotiki, in the Bay of Plenty, in a sunny, frost free zone.

18 Jun, 2010

 

Oh, another point re kiwis: there are male and female plants. So, without a his and hers pair, there won't be fruit. That might explain Dido's lack of flowers. And fruit.

18 Jun, 2010

 

The point I was trying to make was that this is Actinidia arguta (kiwai) rather than Actinidia chinensis (or deliciosa) ( kiwi.) It may be much easier than the kiwi, though I will have to see how the fruit develop and what they taste like compared to the real thing.

19 Jun, 2010

 

Never count your chickens before they are hatched! Today I went to check the plant and found ALL the little fruit, about half a centimetre in size have fallen off the plant on to the soil.
They should grow to around 3 cm or more before ripening so I wonder why this could be.
1. The plant is growing very strongly this year and making some good new shoots.
2. I've been watering it far more than last year and I wonder if I've overwatered, although it is planted in a kind of 'pot' made from concrete blocks, standing on soil, but with no base, so it is free to drain.
3. Could it be the fruit are not properly pollinated? We opened up the tiny fruit and they seem to have seeds inside so that might not be the case.
4. Could it be the plant isn't ready to ripen fully developed fruit yet. The fruit were all on the older parts of the plant, probably last year's wood.
Unless anybody else has any ideas, I will just have to wait until next year and see what happens then.

4 Jul, 2010

 

July 31st. Just discovered there remains ONE fruit on my Kiwai which is growing slowly larger, so there must be nothing intrinsically wrong with the plant in terms of being autofertile.
I've also discovered that the chickens are jumping in and out of the planter where it's positioned and scratching, so this doesn't do it much good. They might even be the culprits for why all the small fruits had fallen off. I can just see the chickens pecking them off and then spitting them out as they were too hard and unripe.
Does anyone have any recipes for chickens cooked in kiwi fruit juice?

31 Jul, 2010

 

October: I discovered the single fruit that was left had fallen from the vine, but was only the size of a pea. It was squishy so I didn't taste it!
The layered cuttings don't seem to have rooted yet, but I will leave them in place until the end of the winter to see if that works.
I will keep hoping for some decent fruit in 2011.

8 Oct, 2010

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