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Kiwi In Containers?

 
Posts: 43
Location: Seattle burbs
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Does anyone else have their kiwifruit vines in a container? I impulse-bought two fuzzy kiwi plants last year- a male ('Matua') and a self-pollinating female ('Jenny')- and then realized when I got home that I seriously had no place to put them. I usually get away with impulse plants ("There's always room somewhere," is my motto) but not with these guys...no spot was right at all for them. So into a 15-gallon bucket they went, and I built a trellis so they could climb up to the second-floor deck.

They didn't bloom this year, but from what I understand that's normal for young vines. I'm in zone 8b but we do get a lot of snow up here, so I keep burlap and bubble wrap to protect them in the winter; they did fine last year, no dieback at all. They get about four hours' sun each day at their feet and an extra couple of hours further up the trellis.

But am I just wasting my time? Will they manage to produce in a pot? I wish I'd stuck them in a half-barrel, but I didn't have one; I feel sure I'll have to figure out how to repot them into something larger one of these days.

(Thanks for the new dedicated forum, by the way!)



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I'm sorry to say I have no answer for you, but I'm so glad you're doing this experiment. How's it going now, BTW? Have you seen any fruit? Have the roots burst the container as potatoes or sunchokes might? My question is similar to yours:

Has anyone here heard of a method to grow full-sized kiwi indoors (like in a walipini) by restricting the plant's size by restricting the size of its root ball? Perhaps by using large grow bags which would cause air pruning of the roots?

I know this is a successful method of growing trees. It tends to make the tree send down multiple taproots instead of binding one big one all through the pot. All the roots at the dry edge of the root bag are air pruned instead of binding like they would in a plastic container. What I want to know is whether this method, employed on the vines of full size Kiwi (the more common kind in the supermarket that have hairy skins) will allow them to grow fruit without growing the vine 15-30 feet per year and dominating the whole greenhouse.

-Mike
 
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