The Best Fruit You Have Never Heard Of

I'm referring to the hardy kiwi.  OK, some of you have probably heard of it.  Go ahead and leave an angry comment below if you have.  I had never heard of this plant until I went searching for a shade-producing vine to grow up the new pergola I built over our deck.  It met all my criteria: fast growing, survives New England Winters and had an added bonus of bearing fruit.  The hardy kiwi is like a little cousin to the kiwi fruit you are familiar with in the grocery store but with one key improvement: it doesn't have the fuzzy skin.  Instead, it is smooth like a grape and you eat it whole.  It is sooo much easier to eat than the work that goes into preparing a traditional kiwi.  Why aren't these everywhere?  I guess, like with imperial measurements, we like to do things the hard way.

This the hardy kiwi shown next to an apple for size reference:

In my ongoing quest to turn my suburban yard into a farm, I decided to grow some.  I bought my vines on e-bay.  I got a female Ananasnaya and Ken's Red along with a male pollinator (they are not self-fertile).  They grew very fast with runners reaching the top of the pergola the first year and within three seasons they were providing good shade on my deck.  The vines now provide complete shade for the deck in Summer.  This is what the vines look like now in Autumn as the leaves have started falling:

In the 3rd year we started getting fruit and by the 5th year it was totally covering the pergola and we probably got 50lbs of fruit from the vines! Uh, I mean 20 kilos.  They were stuffed into every corner and crevice of the fridge to stave off ripening until we could consume them.  I'd bring a batch to work every day to put out for everyone to nibble on.  (If you are a coworker who already knew about hardy kiwi from me, go retract your angry comment below 😉)

The kiwi ripen in mid-October and I just finished harvesting this past weekend.  Production this year wasn't great.  I got maybe 10lbs.  Dang, I mean 4 kilos.  Here's some of the harvest: 

I have a few theories on why the production was down this year.  For one thing, we had a pretty extreme (for Massachusetts) drought this summer and squirrels and chipmunks ate all of my other fruit before it ripened, I assume for the water content.  I lost all my pears, apples and cherries 😡.  They got a few of the kiwi, but for the most part left them alone for some reason.  Maybe because they ripen later and we had relief from the drought in the early Fall?

The more probable cause for the drop-off in yield has to do with improper pruning.  Last year I kept pruning off all the new shoots since the vine was fully covering the pergola and there was no place for them to grow except up the house.  It turns out the kiwi are only produced on second year growth.  Since I pruned so much of last year's new growth, there wasn't as much second year wood available for growing new fruit.  This year, I left some of the shoots at the end of the season and will prune back heavily in the Winter but leave those new shoots and hopefully production will be back up.  Not that I want 50lbs again.  20lbs is a reasonable target. (Arrggghhh- I give up. I can't make my default thinking metric.)

Now you know!