Hardy Kiwi ground protection
We put a healthy layer of
aged wood chips on the Hardy
Kiwis today.
All three plants produced
plenty of new vines this year but no fruit.
The wood chips should
increase their ground protection, which might be enough to give them a
boost in the Spring growth spurt of 2013.
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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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Our vines grew fairly well and produced a handful of fruits. When the summer heat turned up I watered them more and had the tips turn black and die back partly. The vines are putting on even more growth now, almost a month after we stopped irrigating them. I observed the same pattern with the cuttings I took and had in small pots.
The Kiwi's don't like to have their feet wet and the die back and subsequent black tips were a signal to stop watering. The leaves droop and go limp when they need water. The plants can tell you quite a bit if you know what you are looking for. Hopefully this information will be of some help to someone out there.
The 3 cuttings and the 2 vines in the ground are doing very well now. The vine diameter is about 1" in it's second year in the ground.
BeninMA --- Yeah, that does make it sound less problematic. I'm confident in my abilities to keep the vines under control, as long as they don't spread into the woods via seeds.
Brian --- Thanks for sharing that extra data! I'm jealous of your handful of fruits. Maybe next year....