Why a nine-year-old hardy kiwi won't bloom
Our three hardy kiwi
bushes have been in the ground for nine long years without offering a
single fruit. We
did see a few flowers in 2014, but none appeared on the
male plant and the female flowers eventually dropped off. I keep saying
we're going to rip the plants out...but Mark likes them and they're
very little work, so I've left them alone.
This past winter, I
started wondering whether the problem could be our winter-pruning
method. Were we cutting off all the blooms before they had time to set
fruit? To test that hypothesis, I didn't prune at all this past
winter...and to my surprise I did indeed see numerous flower buds on
the male and on one female this spring!
After carefully pruning
off excess growth while leaving the flower twigs behind, though, I've
decided that I probably wasn't removing all of the flower
buds in previous rounds of pruning. Because what I mostly cut off is
long, vigorous vegetative growth like this...
...but in only one
instance did I find kiwi blooms emanating from what I would have
considered a watersprout-to-be-pruned.
Instead, most flowering
shoots are on small, sheltered branches hidden deep within the kiwi
bush.
So I'm back to
hypotheses A and B, both of which revolve around problematic
late spring frosts. Either the April and May freezes that
inevitably nip back the kiwis' spring growth have slowed the maturity
of the vines, or the plants have been ready to fruit for years but
their flower buds are what get nipped during those late freezes. Maybe
we'll get lucky and bypass the possible frost this weekend so the
plants can avoid either of those issues for one year?
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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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It might not be late frosts-it could be winter cold itself.
We live in what used to be the USDA Zone 4 'Hook' in the southwest corner of Iowa. Minneapolis weather in a little comma shaped hook of wonder. High winds, extreme cold/hot shifts, and blizzards in the winter. Twenty miles south, it can be zone 6. Usually, we are considered zone 5. So....
Peaches were my Dad's favorite fruit to worry over. Most years we could raise them. Some years not. Dad would start picking off buds just as soon as he could see them in the late winter/spring. He would take a sharp knife and cut through the middle of them. He was looking to see if the inside was green or black. If black, it meant the winter had been too cold and the buds were killed. No fruit.
I'm thinking your buds might not be tough enough for your winters. Another thing to protect????
Never give up!!!
I have 11-12 yr old male & female mini kiwi vines. I was about to give up on them after 8 yrs with no fruit to ever be seen. Then in the spring of yr 9 we had issue with carpenter bees. Can I tell you, those bees must have done some magic because it was like a kiwi explosion. There was a ridiculous amount of fruit.
Then the next two years, nothing, fruitless again. But now this spring the bees are back. Not a crazy amount like a few years ago, so I left them alone to see what would happen (testing my bee theory). I checked yesterday, and low & behold, there are buds. Yay! 🥝
I can’t be positive, but in my case, I’m thinking the bees have something to do with it. 🐝 🐝 🐝 Good luck!