Island Mama

Well, actually, two girls. Two female kiwi vines.

We moved into this house last September, and the previous owner told us the two kiwi vines out back were supposed to be a male and a female, but since they’d never produced anything in the seven years they’d been there, she thought, perhaps, they were, in fact, both the same. Two males, or two females, she didn’t know.

(Quick kiwi lesson: The female bears fruit after about 5 – 9 years, but needs a male plant, of any age, for pollination. The only way to tell the sex of a kiwi vine is to look at the flowers when they bloom in late spring/early summer.)

We waited and waited and waited for flowers, hoping for at least one female so we might have a chance at fresh kiwi fruit this year or next. We even planted a male in the spring, just in case, but the slugs ate it.

A couple of days ago, the first flower opened on one of the vines. I looked up the pictures online and discovered, to our great delight, it is a female! And today, the second vine opened flowers and it’s also female!

Now all we need is a male to pollinate them. It can be done by hand — we just need to find someone with some flowering male kiwi vines who can donate a few flowers to kiss our flowers and hopefully we’ll have fruit!

And next year, we can try planting a male again and coddle it a bit more to ensure survival and a crop of garden fresh kiwi fruit!