The male vines of the kiwifruit flower in the springtime, and after the flowers perish it’s time to give the vines a trim! Lynda taught me the guidelines for this procedure. The first step is to choose four “stabilizers”, which are long, healthy branches that can help balance the tangled vine as it grows. The stabilizers create an X shape, two diagonal branches shooting out from one direction of the trunk, and two shooting out from the other. The stabilizers are clipped to a wire running along both sides of the vine to hold them in place. Next, lots of other branches are cut off! The most important thing is that all fresh growth from this year stays on. It’s easy to tell whether or not it’s new growth because the branches are fairly thin, the bark has a light greenish color to it rather than brown, and they are shooting directly up into the sky. All of this new growth will flower next year. Any of the old, long branches draping across that aren’t stabilizers can be cut away, unless they have lots of new shoots coming off of them, in which case they are just trimmed to keep the new growth on the vine. Additionally, branches that are going off in wrong directions (curving backwards on themselves) can be removed.

The whole process is quite a dramatic change- every vine goes from being a jumbled, complicated mess into a nicely organized and well-kept arrangement. It’s necessary to do this every year because it keeps the vines under control and helps improve the yield by allowing the vine to channel all of it’s energy into this year’s growth which will produce flowers to pollinate the females next spring.

Sawing off a big branch

Two stabilizers on a pruned vine

Pruning Graveyard!