My AU Golden Dragon kiwi vine is loaded this year. I removed all of the lateral fruits and any poorly shaped or super small ones, but there still seems to be an excessive amount of fruit. So far I pulled off about 10 lbs. Anyone have experience with thinning fuzzy kiwi fruits?
CORRECTION: the plant is AU Golden Sunshine not Dragon. Dragon is the male pollinator.
Dragon should be the diploid female and Golden Sunshine is the tet female. Neither are fuzzy kiwi, but thinning should be similar. Removing the lateral fruits is wise. The king flower fruits may or may not need thinning, depending on how big the vine is. Thinning will produce larger fruit, but overall yield should be similar with or without thinning.
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Thanks. Oops again. The male is AU Tiger, not Dragon. I also changed the thread title. For some reason I thought that golden kiwi were under the fuzzy kiwi umbrella and was trying to generalize becuase as you said thinning approaches are probably similar between A. chinensis and A deliciosa.
I can’t seem to find much on how many fruits to allow per shoot, or per some other objective measure of plant size. Do you know of any rules of thumb?
I think this Thesis should answer your question, at least for commercial production. You may want to experiment with different canes to see what works best for you.
I have a Yellow Queen kiwi vine that was planted in 2021 and is producing its first big crop. I was surprised by the number of flowers on each fruiting branch, as many as 16 in at least one case. I’m trying to decide how much thinning should be applied to the clusters containing what seem to be excessive numbers of fruit.
I read that the fruiting branches should be pruned to limit the number of leaves to 4 - 6, but I can’t believe that so few leaves could support so many fruits. I did get a lot of natural thinning because I don’t have a male yellow or golden kiwi, and my male green fuzzy kiwi flowers start blooming one or two weeks after the Yellow Queen female. Nevertheless, I have one fruiting branch that has 13 pollinated fruits. I left about a dozen leaves on that branch, but I noticed that some of the fruits in that cluster were not sizing up as fast as others in the same cluster. So, I removed 5 of the smallest fruits; but I don’t know if that is enough.
Does anyone know if there is a general rule to leave maybe 2 leaves per fruit on each branch? That 4 to 6 leaves per branch rule seems to go well with my green kiwi, which usually has 2 to 3 fruits per branch.
Here is a photo of the branch with 13 fruits (a short branch on the left has 4 fruits). You can see that some of the fruits are already smaller, and there is an Issai hardy kiwi behind
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