ten feet high and wide? and how many vines are on the one trellis? or is it 10 feet each
10ft. long 6 ft. wide. each plant is trained to one wire with cordons trained 5ft both ways… my male is trained to my fence row trees right behind them. arctics are much easier to control compared to hardy kiwi.
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when you say theyre trained to one wire, you mean each have their own right?
yes. i had put up 4 wires but wound up putting a vine on every other one to give them lateral space. so far its worked well.
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So from this thread, I take it Geneva 3 is the one to go with for flavor? In my case, I don’t have the real estate, so I’d likely go with a single variety.
ooo, how does this affect the cold hardyness? and please describe the flavor
I’ve found that my Ken’s Red turn red after picking. Yours still look mostly green on the outside as have mine.
I’ll try to remember that I need to taste Melanie.
Do we really know if it is a cross with arguta? When I had it tested a few years ago, the results showed that Melanie was triploid. I’m not sure what diploid males Kiwibob had blooming that could have pollenized his melanandra female (which was confirmed as a tet), but he certainly had kolomikta males. What color are the anthers on Melanie flowers? Yellow or black?
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Hal, I’m only quoting kiwibob. You probably know more accurately.
I don’t have flower photos from this year.
All I know is that it can be pollinated by arguta male and is extremely tasty. In bobs location it never develops this level of sweetness.
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That makes sense. I thought I had remembered Bob describing it as a more tart kiwi and that was what he liked about it cause he’s a self described “sourpuss.”
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I’m in Western Oregon and I think we produce most of the commercial arguta crop for in the US, but can’t find anything regarding cultivar ripening times. Does anyone have a general sense of ripening order and times? I’m looking for the latest ripening as I want the latest winter storage. I have primocane raspberries that last through November around here so I’d really like something berry like that would last into January, but from the looks of it, that might be quite a stretch around here.
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You might want to look at fuzzy kiwis. There are quite a few varieties that I need to store until Jan or Feb. None of the argutas I have grown come anywhere close to that.
That’s what I figured, we have warm winters with frosts in April pretty frequently so I’m wary of fuzzies, I’ll probably just do both and at least have some soft fruit some winters.
I don’t see much difference in fuzzies vs argutas for spring freezes. The fuzzies do wake up a bit earlier but in the end the crop size has been similar on both in the 20 or so years I have been growing them. This last year we had a bad late freeze, I lost nearly all my apricots for example. I got maybe a 10% crop on the fuzzies and something similar on the argutas. They were all leafed out when the freeze hit.
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It’s so easy to grow kiwi from seeds!
I heard there’s a big shortage of male hardy kiwi, and I bet with how easy is to start them, you can grow your own.
So I see that there’s a big problem with male kiwis and even though this experiment was not with colds hardy kiwi, I picked out and spit out a bunch of the seeds from a big delicious but tart Chinese green kiwi and stuck them around a little spider plant I was starting. So many of them grew I can’t imagine it was less than 95%! And they started growing quickly and are still Popping up a month later. Unfortunately I have mistreated them and they were getting too little light already and when I left my apartment they died off of damping, which in my experience is usually caused by a lack of light especially since I hadn’t turned the on in almost 3 days by the time I got back, and that light isn’t even the best.
Overall I would recommend trying to grow yourself a pollinator and when you get a good one, share it!
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I had an issai that didnt live long. It really needs some shade i think it got sun scorched, I got a few fruits off of it but it was pretty sickly before dying over winter
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Does anyone have large amounts of hardy kiwi cuttings that they would be willing to send me? I can pay or trade for them.
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