The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

Nine years to hardy kiwi fruit...I hope

Bumblebee pollinating kiwi

The hardy kiwis are finally blooming, and the bumblebees found them before I did! For those of you keeping track at home and waiting for your own vines to fruit, our kiwis have been in the ground for nine long years. So the report that hardy kiwis bear in two years from cuttings didn't quite pan out in our neck of the woods.

Male and female kiwi flowersOne of our female vines flowered two years ago, actually, but without a male flower no fruit was set. That's despite the stamens clearly visible in the female flower (shown at the top of the image on the right).

Now that we have male flowers (one of which I'm holding near the bottom of the photo), I can see the difference --- the males definitely go all-out on the pollen-production front. Fingers crossed this is the year we taste homegrown kiwi fruits!



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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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I have had hardy kiwi for 5 years and live in Northern Va. This is my first year of fruit as well. I have noticed almost every prior year that the plants get frost killed after their first leafing out. Seems like we get too many growing degree hours before the last frost.
Comment by Brian Sun May 21 12:37:04 2017





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