Kiwi vine help needed

[Leeder]

Hi there,

I was recently given a kiwi plant as a present, I planted it in my garden without much hope of it growing. However much to my amazement, it has grown 5 1/2 feet already in a very short space of time.

I have it planted in my very small flowerbed (facing south east) against the fence and supported with a small trellis.

I have never grown any type of vine before, infact strawberrys have been the only fruit I have grown so far. So as you can imagine I am now a bit confused on how I should be growing the vine.

I have done a bit of research, but being a complete vine novice even the terms cordon, lateral, sideshoot etc confuse me.

I was hoping that someone may be able to give me some advice on how to begin to train my vine and anything else I should be doing to this kiwi.


I orginally was waiting for the main shoot to reach the top of the trellis and then I was going to bend it around and grow it along the top of the fence, however after a bit of research, I release this is completely wrong and I am thinking of moving forward as follows, but am unsure if this is correct:

As the vine has reached the top of the trellis (which sits on top on the fence - see pics) I was going to pinch out the top of this main shoot.

From then horizontal shoots should grow from the plant just below the pinched out top, I planned to train these along the trellis on each side of the plant.

I am unsure if more of these horizontal shoots would grow out from further down on the plant, but if so I was thinking of fixing wires along my fence for these to grow along (although these would only be able to be on the right hand side of the plant due to space restrictions and existing climbers on the fence to the left of the kiwi).

From these horizontal shoots that would be trained along the trellis, vertical shoots should appear growing both upwards and downwards. I would keep the shoots that grow downwards (as I would have nothing to support the shoots that grow upwards) and it is from these that fruits would grow. These shoots would need to be pruned each year.


Is this the general idea or am I understanding this wrong? I really don't want to go off half cocked and pinch out the top of the plant if this is the wrong thing to do and I will be hampering the plant.


Many thanks for any help or advice you can give me.

Lee

[TonyF]

This has come up a few times in the past 6 months and I posted a long response on how to prune kiwis.

Is the plant autofertile, if not you'll not get any meaningful fruit, if at all.

I'd suggest a search for kiwi fruit may help.

[mrs dog]

If it is called Jenny it is self fertile and very hardy. Really kiwis will look after them selves. I think they are pretty with or without fruit.

[Leeder]

Thanks for the responses.

I had actually already done a search and read your posts about pruning kiwi's Tony, infact it was those posts that made me realise my planned approach of letting the kiwi grow to the top of my trellis and then bending it 90 degrees and encouraging it to continue growing along the trellis, wasn't the correct thing to do.

The reason for my post and my main concern though, is because of being a total novice when it comes to vines, my complete lack of understanding of the terms people use, hence why I wanted to put my plans down in laymans terms and find out it I have sort of understood it correctly or if I am still totally off the mark.

I really don't want to be pinching out the top of the main stem, only to be waiting for some side branches (laterals?) to appear, when they never will.

Because of the lack of space and limitations with the garden I have to plan how and where everything will grow and unfortunately most of the advice on kiwi's focuses on the t-bar and wire method. I am pretty much stuck with having to grow my kiwi along and on top of our high fence in our garden and unfortunately I can't change that as the fence is a must to keep our severely autistic son from escaping at every opportunity.

So really I just hoping that someone can tell me if this is a viable option or if I am setting down a path doomed to failure.


Also I am pretty sure the plant is auto fertile, but I will go out into the shed this afternoon to find the label and confirm this.

Again, thanks for any help you can give me.