Thread: Kiwi questions
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Old 20-06-2005, 09:12 PM
Darren
 
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Default Kiwi questions

We live up in the Seattle area. I have a Kiwi vine that is about 8 years
old. For about 2 years, I didn't know what kind of plant it was until one
fall, I found a nice fuzzy kiwi on it. I never saw flowers or anything
(didn't look close enough I guess). I later found out that there had to be
a male around to pollinate it. I found one of my neighbors had a kiwi on
the other side of their house, so I guess it got lucky.

I planted a male kiwi last fall and it is growing nicely so I am hoping that
maybe even next year it will be able to pollinate the female kiwi. It is
about 10-15' from the female.

We decided to move the kiwi because we wanted to expand the vegi garden etc.
This was about 3 years ago and has been growing nicely - a lot of vegatation
but no kiwis (no noticable flowers). One problem is that it doesn't get as
much sun as it did in the original spot. We watched it yesterday (nice
sunny day here) and it only gets maybe 2 -3 hours of direct sun in its
current spot. The big trees around it have grown more and blocked out the
sun. I heard \ read somewhere that the kiwi needs more hours of direct
sunlight to get the flowers growing. In the old spot, it got about 4 - 5
hours of sun a day (maybe a bit more) during the summer.

The question - would it be worth the potential shock on the kiwi to move it
back to the original spot just to increase the amount of sun it gets in a
day from 2-3 to 4 -5+ hrs a day? I moved it 3 years ago and it took off
and grew just fine so I think it could survive another move. I did it in
the fall \winter so that is when I would move it this time too.

I realize that pruning and fertilizer play a big role in flower\fruit
production, so I have been trying to do that "properly". It would just be
bad if I was doing the proper pruning and it will never produce because it
isn't getting enough sun. On the other hand, I would hate to stress it
(and possibly kill it) by moving it when it only needs a couple hours of sun
a day to product flowers, and I could be just doing something else wrong.

Any opinions \ ideas on this would be appreciated.

Thanks
Darren