Last year, we looked at how to prune grapes, brambles, and some ornamentals. Now we are going to continue our way through our orchard and take a look at how to prune kiwi vines. It is essential to prune your kiwis every year. They are a massive vine that can quickly get out of control and crush your support structure if not carefully managed.
Kiwis are a little bit more confusing to prune than some plants. Fortunately, they are vigorous and grow so rapidly, they are very forgiving. If you screw up and prune them wrong, you might get less/no fruit this year, but by next year no one will ever know.
Exactly how you prune your kiwis is going to vary a little bit depending on what kind of trellis you have them growing on, however the same principles apply regardless. Both hardy kiwis and fuzzy kiwis are pruned similarly. They both fruit on the same kind of wood.
As we have mentioned before, knowing what wood your plant fruits or flowers on is critical to both knowing when and how to prune.
A lot of plants fruit on either new wood, or old wood. Not both. New wood is defined as wood that grew this season. Old wood is wood that grew last season or before. Kiwis can’t make things that easy for us. They flower on new wood. But only new wood that is growing off of 1 year old wood. So, shoots that grew last summer are going to produce the shoots that flower the coming spring. Shoots that grew 2 summers ago will not grow fruit on the new wood that sprouts.
Another caveat to pruning kiwis is that you prune male and female kiwis differently. You also prune them at different times of year. Female kiwis are pruned in the winter. Male kiwis are ideally pruned in the spring immediately after flowering. Additionally, you lightly prune both sexes in the opposite seasons.
Note: If you don’t have fruit and don’t know what your kiwi vine genders are, you need to look at the flowers when they are blooming. Males and females have very distinctly different looking blooms and are easy to tell apart. Males have a large cluster of stamens only. Female flowers have a pistil and possibly a few stamens. If you don’t have fruit and don’t know what your kiwi vine genders are, you need to look at the flowers when they are blooming. Males and females have very distinctly different looking blooms. Males have a large cluster of stamens. Female flowers have a pistil and a few stamens surrounding it.
Since male kiwis are a little bit more straightforward to prune, let’s start with them.
Later, we can apply the same principals to pruning our female kiwis. Typically, kiwis are trained to some kind of horizontal cordon similar to grapes. There is one main shoot going up to the top of the trellis, or in our case pergola, and a couple branches that are your permanent structure. We aren’t going to go over how to train this structure here, but if you are unfamiliar with how to do so, please refer to the years 1 and 2 sections of our grape pruning article.
Male kiwis are mainly pruned in the spring/early summer. After the male has finish blooming, we want to remove all of the wood that flowered back to our main cordons. Leave stubs so that there are buds to sprout new growth from. Over the summer your male kiwi will produce tons of new growth from these buds. Yes, it might seem scary to remove essentially all growth from your plant, but kiwi vines are very vigorous and it will grow back with a vengeance.
Over the winter just lightly prune your male to remove very twisted or wild shoots. In the winter you want to leave as much growth as possible to maximize your pollination potential. Pruning your male kiwi this way and at this time will maximize the number of flowers and minimize the weight and space the male takes up.
Your female kiwis are mainly pruned during the winter after the fruit has been harvested.
Start by removing anything that is twisted around itself or other vines. Then you want to thin out your vines. The goal is to remove old wood, but you need to leave enough 1 year old wood to get fruit. Ideally you will have new shoots growing off the main cordons or near the main cordons. If that is the case, leave that shoot and remove the wood past it. If you do not have enough shoots like that, thin your shoots that fruited this year and leave them. Plan to thin/remove them the following year.
After your kiwi has flowered and set fruits, you can trim the fruiting shoots a few buds past the fruit. This will encourage your shoots to send out side shoots rather than continuing to grow the fruiting shoot. This is what you want as those side shoots are the ones you want to retain for next year. Taking a few minutes to do this at the same time you prune your male kiwi should make your winter pruning easier.
When pruning kiwis you will be removing the majority of the wood.
It may seem like a lot, but that is what you want to do. If you leave tons of excess shoots your vine will put more effort into growing leaves and shoots and less effort into producing flowers and fruit. There is no sense in keeping old wood that will never fruit again. Removing it will allow you to maximize the amount of fruiting wood present.
Hopefully this helps to take some of the mystery out of pruning your kiwis. Don’t worry if you don’t get it exactly right the first time. Vines are extremely forgiving. Observe the results of your pruning, learn and modify as needed next season.
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