Does anyone have any pruned hardy kiwi photos to post? I’ve seen drawings showing what they are supposed to look like, but I’d like to see something more realistic than a couple lines on a piece of paper!
To try to get the ball rolling, I’ll post a couple of mine. These probably have a long way to go, but believe it or not, I’ve already removed a lot of wood from these suckers.
Everything always looks so simple and straight forward in diagrams. It would be so much easier if anything that I grew would just look at them before putting out growth!
I believe that- I bet I could post pics of my vines with half of them cut off and people would think it hadn’t been pruned. Maybe I’ll do a before and after this weekend. It’s probably a good idea to prune before they really start to wake up. I remember reading that they get damaged if you prune once the sap starts flowing (they leak excessively).
Looking at the pic, I see a few spots where one vine is winding on another. I often try to unwind them and then cut (at most) one of the two. But, I should probably just hack both off and save some time 
I prune mine like grapes - remove 90% of the wood. The only long ones I leave are to grow the vine in a new direction, everything else is a foot or less.
I am currently growing my kiwis over to the next row trellis, I had blackberries there which were not doing well. Let the kiwis take over 
Like Scott, I also prune them like grapes – at least the female plants. I leave the male largely unpruned until it has flowered, then prune it back hard. I made the mistake one year of pruning the male back hard before it flowered, and it ended up providing little pollen and I had a very small crop. The pollen is blown onto the females by the wind, and so the more pollen the males make, the more fruit.
Thanks folks! (still looking for photos though! 
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Bob - yeah, there are a bunch of twisted vines trying to strangle each other. I always amazed at how long some of those vines get as they run out of trellis and make a U-turn and go back into the heart of the plant.
Scott - I had a light bulb moment when I read your “prune them like grapes” concept. Duh! Why didn’t I think of that?!!?!? I’m usually worried that I’ll take off too much wood and impact my harvest, but I hadn’t yet made the connection that my harvest is so huge that I end up with Kiwi fatigue on both the picking and eating ends. I had pounds of the stuff go bad last year because I couldn’t eat them all in time.
Austransplant - thanks for the tip on not over pruning the male. I could have easily done that as start hacking 90% of the wood away.
I just finished pruning my kiwis tonight. Well I will do another pass but I got the worst. I pruned everything back except some I am trying to extend to new trellis areas. Its really easy to extend kiwis, just take one of those 18-footers and put it to the new spot
Oh, I also learned a lesson about pruning, I was working on the kiwis last night and was frenetically cutting in a big ugly patch of vines and I nicked my thumb. It was bad but it could have been emergency room bad which it was not. Be careful, razor-sharp pruners are great when they are on your side but very scary when not!
Here I am training some over to a new trellis (actually an old trellis with not enough light for currants I had there):
Here is an old male:
The long canes in front are my cordifolia that died back which I am trying to restore. all the long canes belong to it.
Here is a chinensis. Note how I leave spur wood if its alive. All dead spur wood I remove but I don’t remove much more than that.
Any long cane you see in any picture is replacement for an old part or extending to a new area.
I should do more thinning on the ones with lots of small shoots but I usually don’t do much and still get a good crop. Those small shoots usually self-thin pretty well, its not as bad as grapes. The main thing is get the long shoots out or use them to extend to new areas or renew tired parts of the vine.
