Smokymist - I am in N. VA and I have two female and one male Anna kiwi's that at about 11 years old. Mine have never fruited and this year I decided that the reason is that I have been improperly pruning then. Essentially I have been pruning off the laterals where the fruit will be produced. 5 years after I [planted them I had to move them and that retarded their development. I did not get my first blooms until they had been in their new location 5 years. (That was this year.) I had both male and female blooms (a few) but they did not fruit. For pruning I have read that you need to prune in the late winter leaving your trunk, two laterals and 12-18 inch cross branches. Throughout the growing season you need to prune to prevent the plant from expending its energy in undesirable growth.

Hardy kiwis can take a long time to fruit, even with proper pruning. I have a 10-year old plant that has yet to fruit. The fuzzy kiwis fruit faster.

Scott

Mine took 7-8 years before they ever bloomed. Spring frosts most years burned off all the foliage (maybe blossom buds,too?), necessitating re-leaf. think mine set a few fruit ONE year (I didn't get any of them) before that area of the orchard was bulldozed to put in my wife's tennis court. I didn't shed a tear over the kiwis going away.

One of Lee Reich's books seemed to have a good, fairly detailed section on pruning hardy kiwis.

Thank you all....well I have all the patience in the world if I need to wait longer. We are hoping to move soon to a place with some land, so all of my fruits and even some of my trees, including figs, are all in gigantic pots ( can you just picture us on moving day ?).....So the consensis is to prune, wait until winter to do so, and just do it carefully ? I need to learn pruning....seriously I do - as I don't prune any of my fruits right now.

Hi all! Its very difficult to find info that makes sense about pruning. These plants produce in the wild, but why so difficult in the yard?
My Anna and Meader have been in my yard for about 5 years now. Anna has grown up about 10 ft as one stem and then splits into a few in the typical T shape, however, its not just a T its more like a T with whispies on each end and maybe some other older wood with new growth coming out of it. It looks healthy and I pruned it this year, hoping it might help. The meader, something happened to it a couple years ago so its nice and bushy but not tall, maybe about 5 feet now. Its going, but I am getting so discouraged. The foliage is very green and both plants are in mostly full sun all day. I just don't get it. I wonder if I should try 2 new varieties that produce quicker.

Kiwis develop short spur wood where most flowering occurs but when mature will also flower on the beginning of vegetative shoots. Are you saying the plants are not yet flowering?

You should remove the most vigorous shoots during the growing season- the spur wood is less vigorous and more knobby.

Late frost will knock out the crop and native bees have very little interest in their blossoms, which I guess is why a male plant needs to be growing right next to the females. I never found them reliably productive even though I learned to manage them to produce profuse flowers. Some years they'd bare well but 2 out of 3 not so much.

When I said late frost wipes them out, I meant much lighter frost than other common fruit varieties. Once they leaf out they are as tender as tomato plants.

In my brief experience I wouldn't say hardy kiwis are as tender as tomatoes. We had back-to-back freezes mid-April this year that hit a lot of things hard: all the new foliage on the mulberries, 99.9% of my Asian pear crop (but not the pear leave), the native persimmons that had leafed out already, all the early strawberry bloom, all the growth on a gingko tree (something I hadn't seen before in my 7 years here)... In other words, we had a fairly severe late spring cold event, and there was a lot of new growth on my kiwis that was zapped, but randomly throughout my one largest vine (Anna) there was quite a bit of growth that survived, and I have an Issai in a sheltered spot -- it's the only variety that's bloomed for me so far, but all my other vines have only been in the ground for about a year -- that's still blooming now. For whatever it's worth, I was first introduced to kiwis from a local vine (completely neglected, growing in an apple tree) in 2011, and I discovered another vine just to the east where I was able to get some fruit last year, so they seem to fruit in this area often enough. The vine I got fruit from last year hadn't been pruned in at least a couple years and was loaded with fruit. It was pruned heavily this winter. I'll have to ask if there's fruit on it this year. I think it's just far enough to the east that it escaped the late freeze this year.

My kiwi blooms and develops fruit, but they fall out and don't ripe. This is happening a second year in a row. I prune and prune, but the result is the same. Any advice?

Hroma, what species and cultivar of kiwi do you have?